Electronic Book Review - oulipohttp://electronicbookreview.com/tags/oulipo
enInterferences: [Net.Writing] and the Practice of Codeworkhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/net.writing
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<div class="field-item even">Rita Raley</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2002-09-08</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="epigraph">6.) Code. Use the computer. It’s not a television. <cite id="note_^1">Excerpted from Lewis Lacook’s posting of his “rules” for net.art to the Webartery mailing list, reposted to the Nettime list (February 14, 2002).</cite></p>
<p>Codework refers to the use of the contemporary idiolect of the computer and computing processes in digital media experimental writing, or [net.writing]. Some of the prominent practitioners include Alan Sondheim, who has given the practice and genre its name, Mez (Mary-Anne Breeze), Talan Memmott, Ted Warnell, Brian Lennon, and John Cayley. These writers also use different terms to refer to work: Mez composes in a neologistic “net.wurked” language that she has termed m[ez]ang.elle; Memmott uses the term “rich.lit”; Warnell names some of his JavaScript poems “codepoetry”; Lennon refers to “digital visual poetics”; and Cayley produces algorithmic, generative texts, or “programmable poetry.” Writers and artists who have taken up the general practice of codework heed the mandate - “use the computer; it is not a television” - and strive to foreground and theorize the relations between interface and machine and so reflect on the networked environment that constitutes and is constituted by a digital text. The precise techniques vary, but the general result is a text-object or a text-event that emphasizes its own programming, mechanism, and materiality.</p>
<p>Picture e.e. cummings, bp Nichol, or Emmett Williams upgrading their medium and exchanging their typewriter keys for the units of programming languages, and the result would in part resemble the contemporary mode of experimental writing and net.art called “codework.” So, Mez, for example, expressly strives</p>
<p class="longQuotation">2 uze computer kode kon.[e]vent.ionz spliced with irc emoticons and<br />
ab[scess]breviations….<br />
2 spout punctu[rez]ationz reappropri.[s]ated in2 sentence schematics….<br />
2 illustrate the x.pansion of software potentialities of co:d][iscours][e<br />
in an environment x.clusively reliant on it. <cite id="note_^2">Mez, <a class="outbound" href="http://beehive.temporalimage.com/archive/34arc.html">The Art of M[ez]ang.elle.ing.</a> Also, see her introductory description to the <a class="outbound" href="http://netwurkerz.de/mez/datableed/complete/index.htm">data][h!][bleeding texts</a>, which was short-listed for an ELO writing award (2001).</cite></p>
<p>In practical terms, the difference between Emmett Williams, “Meditation No. 1” or e.e. cummings’s, <a class="outbound" href="http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/eecummings/grasshopper.shtml">“r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”</a> and a net.wurked text by Mez, Warnell, or Memmott is the difference between the typewriter and the computer, the difference of what the medium allows. <cite id="note_^3">For another manifesto, see <a class="outbound" href="http://www.hotkey.net.au/~netwurker/sld001.htm">Blood Puppets and all</a>. Though not individually noted as such, all excerpts from Mez’s codework quoted in this essay are to be read as “[sic].”</cite></p>
<p>Broadly, codework makes exterior the interior workings of the computer. One formal purpose is to bring the function and code of the computer to a kind of visibility. That is, to illuminate the many layers of code - the tower of programming languages that underlies the representation of natural languages on the screen. For all of the differences among particular instances or events of codework, they all incorporate elements of code, whether executable or not. Code appears in the text, then, in whole or in part, in the form of a functioning script, an operator, and/or a static symbol.</p>
<p><a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/literal">As John Cayley’s essay in this ebr release will indicate</a>, there is a reiterative component to my initial description of codework. Cayley, Sondheim, Memmott, and others have outlined, discussed, and queried this branch of new media experimental writing, in forms ranging from the short gallery review to the listserv posting and conference presentation. We are, however, only now approaching a second wave of critical discourse on the subject, and some of the descriptive foundation still needs to be articulated as we move on to consider some of the more important questions and issues raised by the practice: the relations between natural and programming languages; the link between contemporary codework poetics and earlier, “avant-garde,” found-object artistic practices; the schism between formal aestheticism and socio-cultural politics; and the question of cognitive transformation.</p>
<p>Codework participates in a larger movement that we might call the “art of code,” in which the code used to produce the work seems to infiltrate the surface, the former domain only of natural languages and numeric elements. For example, on her recently released album, <span class="booktitle">Head Slash Bauch</span>, Antye Greie-Fuchs (AGF) reads lines of code deconstructed into syllables. [Click <a class="sound" href="/resources/1126041574118/[net.writing]/AGF.wav">here</a> for a sample] She intermingles English, German, elements of markup languages, and the language of code, such that “layer readme slash p ID blockquote slash layer” resonates aurally, symbolically, and technically. The art of code is not limited to any one particular media environment, and its use as a medium reflects the expanding symbolic database that is at once artistic and communicative. So, too, does it reflect the changes in natural and machine languages and the changes in our evaluation of both. That these encounters with code, however fleeting, partial, or incomplete, should necessarily result not only in revised cultural forms and practices, but also in anxieties about intrusion, contamination, and uncontrollability, is evident in Jessica Loseby’s illustrative net.art work <a class="outbound" href="http://www.kanonmedia.com/news/nml/code.htm">Code Scares Me</a>. Loseby’s installation uses Flash actionscripting to “domesticate” the monstrosity of code and directly thematize the fear of invisible and unknowable code, disturbing because she considers it to be “a language that is both hidden and alien to me.”</p>
<p><span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essaysnet.writing/loseby-t.gif" width="160" height="98" /></span><br />
For Loseby, code is initially understandable only in terms of impenetrable darkness. It lurks beneath the surface of the text, but it is not in direct dialogue with that text: it is read and yet not read at the same time. The fear, further, is that code is autopoietic and capable of eluding the artist’s attempts to domesticate it and bring it into order: “I imagine it unlocking itself in my absence,” she notes, conjuring a vision of code compiling itself, generating its own output, and moving toward self-organization. In this instance, code is `scary’ because it is both unknown (`foreign’) and known (understood to have emergent properties).</p>
<p>An art of code, though, would almost necessarily suggest that code can be beautiful instead of alienating. For instance, Geoff Cox, Alex McLean, and Adrian Ward argue at length for “The Aesthetics of Generative Code” in a paper that suggests that the beauty of code lies in its performance, functionality, and execution. <cite id="note_^4">I have elsewhere explored the question of the theoretical differences between analog and digital text; see “Reveal Codes: Hypertext and Performance,” <a class="outbound" href="http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.901/12.1raley.txt">Postmodern Culture</a> 12:1 (September 2001).</cite> This kind of affect for the elegance of code is shared by Ellen Ullman, though she holds out as well that elegance is linked to operation. So, too, does an aesthetic appreciation of code for these programmers require a knowledge of its operation, such that form and function (execution) are thought together. Ted Warnell’s visual, computational poem, “Lascaux.Symbol.ic” serves as a particularly apposite illustration of this fusion, displaying as it does a JavaScript with both operational and visual style. Similarly, in <a class="outbound" href="http://www.digitalcraft.org/?artikel_id293">“If () then ()”</a>, Jutta Steidl claims that code has and is capable of expressing an aesthetic, but she questions whether programming languages can express the inexpressible and whether they are capable of speaking to, and generating, literary affect. By emphasizing the affective deficiencies of code, she maintains an ontological distinction between programming language and literary language, even as she equates some of the historical properties of the literary, e.g. `beauty,’ with the functionality of code.</p>
<p>The art of code and the practice of codework has a socio-cultural history, more specifically origins within origins, and it is not limited to our contemporary moment. Its genealogy includes many instances of codes used as a medium for art, including Oulipo’s Algol code poems and the use of computer instructions in their texts; the long-term tradition of generative aesthetics and poetic programming, such as Tristan Tzara’s `algorithm’ for Dadaist composition (including in a similar vein La Monte Young’s and John Cage’s instructional scores); ASCII art; the composition of <a class="outbound" href="http://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/quine.htm">Quines</a>; and Perl poems. <cite id="note_^5">Also see Loss Pequeño Glazier’s short discussion of the beauty of code in <span class="booktitle">Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries</span> (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 103-110. <a class="internal" href="/electropoetics/e-poetry">reviewed in ebr by Brandon Barr</a></cite></p>
<p>There are other analogues: though not limited to an online environment, the formal, aesthetic, and political principles of codework as a general category are echoed throughout, and indeed informed by, net.art discourse: the two often have a common basis in hacker culture; Open Source advocacy; anti-corporatist politics; authorial and textual self-reflexivity; and software technics. Such a broad shared platform suggests that net.art and the information arts, and not the Eastgate and Brown schools of hypertext, provide the socio-cultural, historical, and textual context for the branch of experimental media writing classified as codework. But codework is not a homogenous, monolithic, or pure genre. In his definitive introduction to the practice, and to a special issue of <span class="booktitle">American Book Review</span>, Alan Sondheim has carefully outlined a taxonomy of three types of codework: “Works using the syntactical interplay of surface language”; “Works in which submerged content has modified the surface language”; “Works in which the submerged code is emergent content.”</p>
<p>The last, which has found a fairly wide-spread audience in net.art and digital art circles, exhibits a pronounced aesthetics of destruction and failure. In this branch of codework, the buried, or deep, code, is text and content, and because this code occasionally has damaging effects - varying in intensity and seriousness - the practice associated with it is sometimes classified as virus art. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.digitalcraft.org/index.php?artikel_id=283">The Digital Craft</a> organization has recently issued an exhibition catalogue on the “I Love You” virus that explores the possibilities of considering the programmers of this and other computer viruses as artists and linking them to the poetic appropriators of virus code active in net.art and digital poetry circles for the last five years. <cite id="note_^6">For a more extensive and detailed account of the precursors to codework, see Florian Cramer, <a class="outbound" href="http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/writings/net_literature/code_poetry/cream_2001/code_poetry_cream.txt">“Program Code Poetry.”</a></cite> The net.art team <a class="outbound" href="http://www.jodi.org">Jodi</a> might be understood as codeworkers in a similar fashion, with the obvious difference that Jodi’s projects are not contagious or crippling in the way that a computer virus would be. <cite id="note_^7">Florian Cramer also comments on “virus art” and notes that “computer viruses like <span class="booktitle">Melissa</span> and <span class="booktitle">I LOVE YOU</span>, small bits of text written in computer control code, strike me as perhaps the most dense and interesting examples of contemporary literature in the Internet.” See <a class="outbound" href="http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/writings/net_literature/permutations/kassel_2000/combinatory_poetry.html">Combinatory Poetry and Literature in the Internet</a> (4) and <a class="outbound" href="http://www.digitalcraft.org/?artikel_id=294">Language, A Virus?</a> Alan Liu’s book, <span class="booktitle">The Laws of Cool: The Culture of Information</span> (Stanford UP), concludes with an extended discussion of the aesthetics of destruction and virus art.</cite> This type of codework, then, concerns itself with troubling the distinction between form and content, between surface and depth, such that one generally has to look at the source code to discern the content, functionality, even “meaning” of the work. To understand this particular practice of codework, we might take a general claim about all hypertext made by Mark Amerika and make it more specific: creative content and the source code, he says, are “one and the same thing” (<a class="outbound" href="http://www.altx.com/hyperx/htc2.html">Hypertextual Consciousness</a>).</p>
<p>Jodi’s work leads us toward what I take to be the most practically useful heuristic for critical investigation: a binary structure for codework that draws a distinction between code that is operational and has depth and code that is isolated on the surface of a text. <cite id="note_^8">For a discussion of net art and its “aesthetics of failure,” with a specific focus on spectatorship, see Michele White, “The Aesthetic of Failure: Net Art Gone Wrong,” <span class="booktitle">Angelaki</span> 7:1 (April 2002), 173-93. Of relevance here as well is N. Katherine Hayles’s analysis of print and digital textuality in terms of surface and depth, respectively; see, for example, “Print is Flat, Code is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis,” <span class="booktitle">Poetics Today</span> (Fall 2001).</cite> The codework that has depth exhibits what Cayley will call an “aesthetics of compilation,” addresses the machine, and therefore “works,” wields a performative power not equaled by the codework that treats code as a found object, a ready-made that operates as a static work of art. For Cayley, the performative power of the text authentically and genuinely resides with operable code: the difference is that between Roland Barthes’s theorization of the potentiality of language and the potentiality of an algorithmic poem, which changes the system in a materially visible way. That is, the codework that has depth, that is pure rather than mere “decoration or rhetorical flourish,” signifies within the realms of both natural and programming languages; it can continuously function and be legible within both systems; and it is capable of altering either one. No mere game of techno-cultural reference or “language of the tribe,” as TS Eliot might say, this practice of codework differs structurally, metaphysically, and practically from the codework that incorporates static, non-functional elements of code into the surface, or “Interface text.” Specifically, this working code has a “genuine” rather than “pretended ambiguity” of address; it is simultaneously addressed, in other words, to the human and to the machine.</p>
<p>Cayley also powerfully critiques the critical tendency to refer to the intermingling of natural language and codes as a creolization, but this is not to discount the linguistic changes signaled by the codework of the surface. The codework texts that remix natural language (usually English) and programming languages result in a kind of hybridized, electronic English, a language not simply suggestive of digital and network culture but a language of the computer and computing processes. When English is filtered through the languages of the machine something like this type of codework emerges; it is an English that has been manipulated and encrypted into an electronic computer-speak. Florian Cramer terms this hybrid of natural and machine languages “post-combinatory,” suggesting both a fusion and an integration on the one hand, and a separation, or an incomplete mixture on the other (“CP” 5). This emergent language is ubiquitous within contemporary advertising and mass media: it is the idiolect of mobile phones, pagers, instant messengers, and chat settings, even appearing in a recent back-page <span class="booktitle">New Yorker</span> cartoon by Roz Chast (February 4, 2002), “The I.M.s of Romeo and Juliet,” which updated Shakespeare to a scene of bedroom-to-bedroom Internet messaging, complete with the abbreviating and punctuating elements of much current codework. The basic semantic formula includes these abbreviating and punctuating elements: substituting numbers for letters; n = `in’ and `and’; use of the dot, brackets, hyphens, slashes, and the doublepipe. One can only assume, too, that this type of codework will continue to incorporate the alphabetic, non-alphabetic and metacharacters of programming languages, such as the “??” (“hookhook”) operator, as they move into widespread use.</p>
<p>And, as the forms of digital writing and art continue to change in relation to production environments and programming languages, it is interesting to speculate whether increasing institutionalization will mean that these high-level machine languages will be sanctioned for study as a “foreign” language within the humanities. The different kinds of institutional training programs developing now, such as those at UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, and Brown in the U.S., suggest that we will indeed see programming languages included within degree certification programs in literature and the arts at the undergraduate and graduate levels. At the moment, however, what we see in most codework writing and art practices is less code per se than the language of code: codework that integrates elements of code into natural languages and brings code to the surface as a medium for literary, artistic, and experimental composition. The codework practice of “netwurker” Mez, which again involves the use of a made-up code language as a mode of artistic composition and everyday communication, is paradigmatic. <cite id="note_^9">An overview of Mez’s work can be found in her recent <a class="outbound" href="http://www.javamuseum.org/magazine/mez_solo.htm">JavaMuseum</a> solo show (February 2002), commemorating her nomination as “Java Artist of the Year 2001.” For a sample of the critical analysis of her work, see LaCook; Beaubien; Esdaile; Beiguelman; Stephanie Strickland; and Rossitza Daskalova, “Language Transformed by the Machine,” <a class="outbound" href="http://www.ciac.ca/magazine/en/cadre.html">CIAC Magazine</a> 13. Also, Mez keeps an archive of clippings at <a class="outbound" href="http://www.hotkey.net.au/~netwurker/nav.htm">http://www.hotkey.net.au/~netwurker/nav.htm</a>.</cite></p>
<p>Mez’s medium is a neologistic net.wurked language that she has termed m[ez]ang.elle, which has at least two narratives of origination. One is almost hallucinatory and never presented in straight English. In 1995, while working on an HTML document _cutting spacez,” she realized that actively networked communicative circuits produce mixed and entangled data streams: “jumping fromme one terminal 2 the next//running three chat-rooms at once via three different terminal [behavior]z sew as 2 opt.tim[id no lonah]ize the time d-layzm chairz blurring b-tween as the monitorz flashed fiction wurdz that [k]neededObleed.ed e.vent[ingz]ualli into the cutting spaces doccoO.” <cite id="note_^10">See her rhizome.org interview with Josephine Bosma, February 1, 2000. She elsewhere terms this process the “de/reconstruction of language” but, in that this is a fairly broad statement, I am not convinced that this is the most useful description of her work. See her interview with <a class="outbound" href="http://www.hotkey.net.au/~netwurker/streetpress.htm">Streetpress</a>.</cite> The other narrative of origination is more concrete: mezangelle emerged from Mez’s borrowing and manipulation of text from email lists and chat settings and specifically from a lengthy email exchange with Matt Hoessli from the CADRE Institute on the 7-11 mailing list, beginning in 1996 and continuing with experiments with members of the Webartery and trAce online writing communities.</p>
<p>Though her codework has “][r][e.volved” and become more visually complex in its presentation with Flash, shockwave, and JavaScript, her methodology remains basically consistent: she continues to work with text, frequently taking portions of a network communicative exchange, and then mangling them with machine language elements such as brackets, colons, slashes, hyphens, and the double pipe (||). One of Mez’s techniques - one among many she shares with NN/Antiorp and other codeworkers - is to replace letters with symbols and with other letters (“2 4m a text”), in a colloquial style associated in a general way with IM and musical forms like hip-hop and urban youth culture (for instance, `z’ substituting for `s’ = `boyz’). Incorporating elements of emergent idiolect of the computer, computer languages, and digital culture, she also makes heavy use of the dot, as a connector that groups together words or partial words; to name hierarchies, as with domain names; to form abbreviations and word combinations; and to separate an object from its properties, as with OO programming conventions. The result is a hybridized neologistic language rich with semantic and poetic possibilities. With some graphical and lexical consideration, then, m[ez]ang.elle - with its play on `elle,’ `angel,’ `mangle,’ and `angle’ - suggests a pointedly feminist aesthetics and praxis of linguistic mutilation. <cite id="note_^11">In this respect, as well as with their shared concern with the bio-politics of the body, there is a striking resemblance between Mez’s aesthetics and those of noted hypertext author Shelley Jackson. See Jackson’s website, <a class="outbound" href="http://www.is.com/">Ineradicable Stain</a>.</cite> After reconfiguring the data elements of her source texts, she directly and indirectly re-channels them to the forums from which they emerged, broadcasting them either through listserv posting or through web-based net.art installations. As her manifestos and statements of artistic principles would suggest, this codework language is something of a formal experiment, but it also reflects on the medium and its artistic potential.</p>
<p>That this “net.wurked” component of her artistic practice should be understood as axiomatic is evident from Mez’s frequent and reiterative email postings and statements of methodological principle on the subject. For example, Mez notes in the artist’s statement accompanying <a class="outbound" href="http://www.javamuseum.org/mez/solo/index.html">her solo show</a> on Java Museum that her writing has at its base an entire archive of ongoing, collaborative, and “multifarious….directed email/irc exchanges and performances.” Further, her list-based commentary on <a class="outbound" href="http://beehive.temporalimage.com/archive/34arc.html">The Art of M[ez]ang.elle.ing</a> stresses that one of her artistic aims is “2 network 2 the hilt N create de[e]pen.den[ting]cies on email lizts for the wurkz dis.purse.all.” She introduces her critically acclaimed <a class="outbound" href="http://netwurkerz.de/mez/datableed/complete/index.htm">data][h!][bleeding texts</a> by noting that “.these t.ex][e][ts r _code wurk_ remnants d-voted to the dispersal of writing that has been n.spired and mutated according 2 the dynamics of an active network.” And, in the introduction to her <a class="outbound" href="http://www.wollongong.starway.net.au/~mezandwalt">curated gallery exhibition</a> at Incubation 2002, she describes her technique as “largely dependent upon an electronic method of production that is exclusive to a networked environment, and shares some characteristics with the very format that houses it [such as n- tegration of email/Web browser/IRC jargon and stylistic blueprints.”</p>
<p>Because codework participates in a long-term discourse of referential layering and linguistic wordplay, Mez’s techniques have also been preceded by experimental, “avant-garde” Language poetics, concrete poetry, and visual poetry. Although the symbolic database and mode of distribution differ, in both can one find a use of brackets, white space, punctuation, and techniques of excision and negation that is at once excessive and indeterminate. We can, however, again speak of the difference or particularity of Mez’s theoretical and practical aims in relation to her poetic precursors, particularly with respect to the mechanism it uses for composition and transmission - its context, and her relationship to that context. The sheer ubiquity and viral spread of both her codework texts and her codework practice echoes back to the very networked environment in which it is situated.</p>
<p>This insistence on the production and delivery environment of her mezangelled texts brings to our attention the necessarily collaborative nature of codework, appropriated as much of it is from listservs and chat settings. Mez and Alan Sondheim, for example, not only build codework texts from communicative exchanges but they also incorporate the responses of their audiences and fold them back into their codework texts, in a continuation of the collaborative production of the text and a fulfillment of the logic of email itself. The reply function, in other words, is coded into a text that is distributed across networks. In this sense, the relationship between codework-text (system) and its generative field and ultimate audience (online environment of chat settings and listservs) could also be understood in terms of feedback, whereby system and environment are both altered as a result of their interaction. <cite id="note_^12"><a class="outbound" href="http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/FEEDBACK.html">Feedback</a>, <span class="booktitle">Principia Cybernetica Web</span>.</cite></p>
<p>The writing of Mez and other codeworkers compels an extended technical dissection, or a line-by-line parsing that would explain the significance of her use of each and every element of different programming languages such as Unix, Perl, and Java (she does not tend to borrow from machine or assembly code but rather from the higher-level languages that are closer to English in structure and vocabulary). However, the fundamentals of that kind of analytical-tutorial work have already been established. Florian Cramer, one of codework’s most prolific and important critics, has circulated intricate and extended annotations of one of Mez’s “wurks,” <a class="outbound" href="http://mail.ljudmila.org/pipermail/7-11/2001-August/001134.html">_Viro.Logic Condition][ing][1.1_</a>, and its thematics of the virus, infection, and the mutual contamination of the organism and the computer. <cite id="note_^13">Cramer text sent by mez breeze in a personal email, “n.sights &amp; n.][elec][troductions” (June 14, 2002).</cite> Some of his most illuminating commentaries consider the significance, within this specific text, of Mez’s use of square brackets; Perl header lines “::”; and the Unix commandline double pipe “||” - the logical `or’ condition - all of which open up multiple grammatical and semantic possibilities within a “line” of mezangelled poetic prose. A rigorously formalist analysis akin to Cramer’s is often not equally revelatory or satisfactory with Mez’s current work. In this sense there is a difference between her early and more recent practices: “mezangelle” has evolved to become a manner of writing, an idiosyncratic style that bears the signature of its author. It is not generally executable code, and it often does not even allude to the functional component of her code elements, but instead functions as a mode of poetic composition and general communication.</p>
<p>In that mezangelle incorporates the punctuating elements of programming languages, such as the dot and the bracket, it partially revives the old, and well-digested, postmodern (or, “(post)modern”) language games played with parentheses and slashes for largely similar general purposes. As Mez notes of her use of the now-expanded database of punctuating “elle-E.ments,” the aim is to “condense/dilute/refresh wordage and imagery meanings/established codes/cues of associative meaning/s” (<a class="outbound" href="http://beehive.temporalimage.com/archive/34arc.html">The Art of M[ez]ang.elle.ing</a>). So, if there were a critical exhaustion with the kind of linguistic double plays afforded by a set of parenthesis, Mez counters by using punctuation particular to the apparatus - Talan Memmott calls this set of punctuation “technical ideogrammatics” - such that there is no true single word to destabilize or negate. Witness three signatures from her current Webartery listserv threads: Cur.][O][va.ture;][co][De][e][p.rivation; and app][lick.ation][end.age.</p>
<p>By making widespread use of brackets and periods to split words (somewhat hypertextually) into multiple component parts - letters, prefixes, suffixes, and phonetic elements - Mez’s strategy is to disturb, disorient, and defamiliarize, to shift “the units of information and communication from the usual and expected to the cryptic” (rhizome.org interview). Such a cognitive disturbance is also partly facilitated by her use of dynamic text elements, as one can find in her <a class="outbound" href="http://netwurkerz.de/mez/datableed/complete/index.htm">data][h!][bleeding texts</a>. Her repetitive technique - the encoding of text into this new mezangelled form is more or less consistent throughout her various texts - produces patterns of dissolution and reiteration that continue to disorient, even once one has more-or-less mastered the rules to the point of perceiving the patterns at all. For Mez’s art and writing, the political purpose of this aesthetic practice is precisely to imagine this kind of interruption and disturbance of the economy of informational transaction.</p>
<p>Given that Mez operates in an expanding field of codeworkers, most of whom also work with “technical ideogrammatics,” whether they be executable or not, establishing the specificity of her artistic project should necessarily reach beyond punctuational difference. Such an analytic approach would be thwarted quite quickly: for example, Mez’s putatively particular use of bracketed expressions in “m[ez]ang.elle” can be analogized to Talan Memmott’s embedding of command structures in his <a class="outbound" href="http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/hypermedia/talan_memmott/index.html">Lexia to Perplexia (“PER[(p)[L(EX)]]ia”)</a>. <cite id="note_^14">Deena Larsen briefly links Memmott and Mez in a short essay on e- poetries in <a class="outbound" href="Currents.http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/currents/fall01/word">Currents</a>.</cite> The components of Mez’s work similarly invite comparisons to Netochka Nezvanova’s style and artistic practice, which also involves a surface play of code, listserv posting, and ever-changing display signatures, avatars of a sort (Nezvanova performing as NN, Antiorp, Integer, and Fifo). In both can one see an artistic personality produced by and coded into the text. One exemplary and distinctive formal feature of NN’s texts is the substituting of the “!” for “I,” which in effect gestures toward a negation of the self (See Beatrice Beaubien and David Johnston on the parallels between them). Rather than splitting symbolic hairs and claiming particularity on the basis of NN’s use of the operator “!” (= not) or Mez’s reiterative use of square brackets, then, it is possible to take a wider look at Mez’s placement within the field. First, there are quantitative differences. Her seemingly inexhaustible productivity - surpassed one can imagine only by Alan Sondheim - has directly contributed to her prominence, ubiquity, and the frequency with which critical commentary on her work appears. She has been able to capitalize on her numerous awards and commissions - all prominently detailed on her web site - precisely because she is both networked and extraordinarily skilled at networking. Her institutional currency also derives from her manifestos and from her frequent articulation, theorization, and defense of her project as a project; in that it comes bundled with its own explanation and critical commentary, the mezangelle project legitimates itself as poetic and political praxis.</p>
<p>Mezangelle, too, makes for distinctive sound bites, both because of its quotable form - it is not as easy to extract self-contained lines from Warnell’s or Cayley’s codework - and because of its thematics, which resonate with theoretical investigations in the field: the organic-machinic divide, infection, gendered subjectivity, data, and networks. Her work is thus situated within the apparatus in two respects: formally and materially on the one hand (through its technologies of inscription), and conceptually on the other. As a whole, her mezangelle project is reflective on the apparatus and on its cultural context. Again, this last description applies also to Memmott’s <a class="outbound" href="http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/hypermedia/talan_memmott/index.html">Lexia to Perplexia (“PER[(p)[L(EX)]]ia”)</a> and Warnell’s <a class="outbound" href="http://warnell.com/syntac/viru2.htm">Viru2</a> to name just two examples, but there are generic variations worth noting: she is less of a theorist and visual artist than Memmott and less of a visual poet than Warnell. More important, because mezangelle is communicative, Mez’s use of her invented language directly suggests and reflects the material and quotidian linguistic changes produced by the mingling of the elements of natural and programming codes. Codework for Memmott is not communicative in the same way; rather, Memmott is developing a language of network theory - not simply a language of the network - that is informed by Greg Ulmer’s articulation of “electracy.” Memmott’s neologisms come out of a theoretical poetics, so to meditate on the relations between the subject and the apparatus, he coins the terms “Narcisystems” and “exe.termination.”</p>
<p>Mez’s techniques invite reading as complex combinatorial anagrams, other instances of excess linguistic disassembly and reassembly. Thus, the many semantic and syntactic units that comprise mezangelle are not just fragmented and re-spliced, as with Memmott and others, but also layered, which tends to disrupt the conventionally linear mode of constructing meaning. There are indeed only differences in the language of mezangelle, but there are almost no brakes applied to these differences: her data texts are mobile, fluid, and unstable, and thus continue to bleed, rather than congeal. Instead, the language flies off in many directions, and the invitation is to read beyond and even against the lateral, particularly given the frequent use of puns and homophones. In that Mez also provides translations, sometimes interlinear, of her mezangelled text assemblages, the sense of linguistic layering and inter-reference is intensified, as is the recognition that a linear translation is impossible because any translation of mezangelle must necessarily suppress the aural and visual elements. Any translation must perform a semantic extraction much like one does while reading one of Mez’s texts out loud, when it is possible to pick up on the deconstruction of lines of code into syllables and units of noise and breath, but impossible to communicate the visual use of code. As she notes in another statement on her practice: <a class="outbound" href="http://www.hotkey.net.au/~netwurker/treatize.htm">“[sorry no immediate translation possible].”</a> It is impossible to perform an immediate translation and fix a stable meaning, and yet her codework gestures toward this impossibility. To fix on the `plain English’ that lies behind the code, or to isolate one lexical or phonetic unit so as to establish a concrete meaning, is to exclude the other units we are asked to apprehend.</p>
<p>In Mez’s codework, elements of computer code are thus used to produce a multiplicity of reference and do not themselves usually maintain a lexical function; in this case their signification is visual. So, she uses “net.wurked” language as a referential structure (using syntax of the computer and of programming) but not to actual algorithms or algorithmic processes. In other words, she produces signs of computer code but not a code-language that is machine-executable. This code-language is brought to the surface as a static art artifact rather than as a functional program, such as with the title of one of her recent net.wurk postings to Webartery: *.imp loading[s] (August 27, 2002). She references the tower of machine languages that operate the system - from machine code up to C and Unix - but codework for Mez isolates the screen as surface. Like Minimalist art, Mez’s work offers a kind of literalism, in that the screen does not simulate a system beneath or beyond; it is instead all opaque surface. In that she does not generally produce codes that activate operations or processes, but she will refer to process, as in this formulation - “alt[.ctrl.delete]etered” - her codework is technically non-referential and technically non-performative. (Florian Cramer and others have speculated as to whether some of her texts are `mangled’ output, but no one has offered evidence of the execution or compilation of her codetexts, failed or successful.)</p>
<p>Cayley’s argument for the importance of executability and for the need to understand the difference between technological symbolism and `real’ code is apropos: Mez indeed writes verbal art and not operable code. As a point of contrast, the code that generates the thirty-two algorithmically generated poems in Cayley’s <span class="booktitle">River Island</span> is addressed to the machine. Cayley has noted that his prioritizing of operationalism and performance derives from his long-term investment in etymology and linguistic history: without an acute sense of linguistic strata, in this case the <a class="outbound" href="http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/p/programming_language.html">tower of programming languages</a> languages, we run the risk of being ahistorical and disregarding the complex semantic and syntactic structures of codes. <cite id="note_^15">Personal conversation with Cayley (July 16, 2002).</cite> Further, his delineation of code and text emphasizes the materiality of the text and challenges the idea that the interface is an isolate or isolatable entity. The strength of his analysis on this point lies in its countering of the idea that hypermedia simply consists of a textual interface. In other words, “writing” in a digital environment consists of both text and code, and programming thus necessarily has a clear literary-poetic element of craft and style. Many of Ted Warnell’s works in his “Poem by Nari” series (such as <a class="outbound" href="http://www.heelstone.com/lascaux/warnell.html">Lascaux.Symbol.ic</a>, <a class="outbound" href="http://warnell.com/syntac/viru2.htm">Viru2</a>, and <a class="outbound" href="http://warnell.com/syntac/exec.htm">code.poetry::executables</a>) would be paradigmatic in that the very script that executes the texts is displayed on the surface. Mez’s codework, though, is precisely opposed to the value of functionality, which is anathema to her treatment of code as an object and to her aesthetics of disruption and interference.</p>
<p>As a partial response to Cayley, we might consider the notion of the separation of code and output in relation to Adorno’s remarks about music as merely a consequence of the score. To consider music consequential in this way essentially privileges the score - the formal instructions for the production of music - over the music itself. <cite id="note_^16">Florian Cramer briefly discusses musical composers and the shift from classical score to instruction code, particularly in relation to John Cage and La Monte Young, in “Digital Code and Literary Text.”</cite> However, codework does not suggest, nor does it need to, that code - the algorithmic score, the instructions that govern and produce a system - itself should be privileged. Rather, codework tries on the whole to move beyond this schism - the code and its `work’ or operation - to make something new. It relies on this schism in order to produce its effects, but then there is a mixing, an interfusion, and something other emerges.</p>
<p>What emerges is an object-oriented aesthetic and a textual practice that objectifies the code structure of the mechanism. The language of OO programming invites certain theoretical questions, with particular respect to codework and net.art. First there is the problem of the digital object as object. An object is usually thought as that which can be perceived, whose state and behaviors are somehow visible. What is the relation, then, between the hypermedia object and the found, kinetic, tactile, or otherwise `physical’ art object? One answer is that the codework of Mez and Warnell is an object work that does not replicate the executable aspect of code. Elements of the deep running codes of the apparatus are put on the screen as artifacts, not as programs or as functioning programming languages. This branch of codework, then, taps into the found art tradition in that its practitioners take a language designed for a pragmatic function and convert it to a language of art. Code is treated by them as a ready-made in that code is turned away from its functional, pragmatic, programmatic purposes, manipulated and situated in a context where it reveals its poetic potential as an aesthetic object. <cite id="note_^17">Florian Cramer: “instead of constructing program code synthetically, they use readymade computations, take them apart and read their syntax as gendered semantics” (“Concepts, Notations, Software, Art” 7).</cite> Its mechanistic purpose, in other words, is instead converted to the poetic. Similarly, email and IMs might themselves be considered as pragmatic, functional, ready-made objects converted to aesthetic purpose. These code objects, however, are <span class="lightEmphasis">disturbed</span>, and they disrupt normal channels of reception.</p>
<p>In the tradition of found-art practices (Rauschenberg, for example), codework comments on the shelf life and obsolescence of objects: it presents a recycling, re-use, and re-activation of objects that were oriented toward disintegration instead. In Warnell’s <a class="outbound" href="http://warnell.com/real/amerika.htm">Amerika</a>, for example, the framing mechanism of code remains intact. In order for it to function it has to be revealed as code; otherwise it loses its codework quality. So, too, the structure of “Amerika” reminds us that code is a perceivable object. In a paratext to the same poem, Warnell associates code objects with avant-garde modernist aesthetics by drawing on the general anti-aesthetic sensibility displayed in the critical discourse on experimental new media writing. He specifically draws from Mark Amerika’s meditations on “hypertextual consciousness,” which are broadly constructed in the style and mode of a manifesto directed against the stifling constraints of materialistic commercial culture. That Warnell should make use of that excerpt from Amerika’s manifesto that refers to the Dadaist ready-made, and that he should also fashion a code poem entitled <a class="outbound" href="http://warnell.com/real/dada.htm">Dadastream</a>, is evidence of the embedded link between codework and the ready-made. <cite id="note_^18">The rhetoric of the ready-made also surfaces in Cramer’s critical commentary on the codework poetry of Mez, Warnell, and others, whom he describes as having “taken up impulses from Net.art by incorporating ready-made bits and syntax from programming languages, binary machine code, network protocols and markup conventions of interpersonal network communication” (“Combinatory Poetry and Literature in the Internet” 4-5).</cite> The relationship between codework and the found art object, in other words, is not retroactively imposed but discursively situated.</p>
<p>To go further, in such a media context, we are further witness to a confusion and complication of the dichotomy between surface and depth, as Jean Baudrillard has suggested. In “Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual Reality,” Baudrillard links the ready-made to the logic of the reality show: in both an object (or, a human being) is extracted from the real and “displaced…on another level to confer on it an undefinable hyperreality” (21). Once “mediumized” and transposed to this other level, stage, or screen, the virtual ready-made performs a live show of its own existence and thus appears as pure appearance. Baudrillard goes on to ascribe this logic of the virtual ready-made to all objects, events, and individuals in our postmodern moment and notes that “all of them might be described in much the same way as Duchamp implicitly categorizes his ready-made object: `It exists, I met it!’” (21).</p>
<p>Codework, like much hypermedia, is a kind of object in that it puts on displays for the user-viewer, whose reactions and responses it then incorporates within its field of performance. In this regard, the object can be imagined as a means to insist upon or instantiate, as it were, the materiality of the medium. The materiality of the digital text has been extensively theorized - notably by Hayles - in terms of the depth model of code and technologies of inscription and mediation, also with regard to the tradition of concrete poetry, and we might add to both a certain understanding of codetext as a found object.</p>
<p>There are links we might then draw between mezangelle and the artistic minimalism of Sol Le Witt or Carl Andre in that she works with found objects, basic visual and verbal elements, and establishes rules for each textual event that vary only slightly from those used before. <cite id="note_^19">The comparison I wish to draw is conceptual rather than physical, and the comparison has its limits, as Alan Sondheim has noted in a personal email (May 28, 2002). There are indeed clear philosophical and material differences - her text-messages are of course not modular, geometrically or symmetrically arranged, nor do they use industrial materials - but the link profitably illuminates the extent to which the codework practices of Mez, NN/Antiorp, and Warnell produces and then operates with variable sets of elements.</cite> Her plans for composition are not outsourced to an art team, but they might very well be in that she essentially constructs semantic and lexical rules, e.g. the substitutive principle that n = `in’ and `and.’ A kind of formal pattern outlined by the symbolic structures of programming languages, then, underlies many of Mez’s “data bleeding texts.” Somewhat analogous to Carl Andre’s alphabetic-typographic poetic exercises, much of Mez’s codework resembles a kind of ABC art in that it suggests elemental and interchangeable units of composition. Andre’s “Pope Byron Andre” begins: “a a A A abroad all Amphibious Ass’s at at/ board Bug Butterfly buzz.” <cite id="note_^20"><span class="booktitle">Poetry 1958-73</span>. Nicholas Serota’s comments about Andre’s poetry are germane here: “The source and manner are characteristic of Andre’s written work: breaking down the existing structures of a text, often found, but sometimes written by himself, analysing and reordering words by such principles as frequency in the text, alphabetic order and number of characters. They are laid out or mapped according to simple visual patterns (e.g. repetition, squares, triangles) and arithmetical (e.g. prime number theorem) principles.” <span class="booktitle">Carl Andre</span> (London: Trustees of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1978), n.p.</cite> While Andre stressed to Hollis Frampton in 1962 that he strove to reduce a text into “its smallest constituent elements: the isolation of each word,” one consequence of which would be “poetry which eliminates the poet,” Mez similarly distills text down to a set of operational elements, including meta-, alphabetic, and non-alphabetic characters (<span class="booktitle">12 Dialogues</span>). Like Minimalism, too, Mez works toward the effacement of the singular signature of the author by incorporating one or many authorial avatars into her work (e.g. “ms postmodernism”), by situating the author “Mez” within “mezangelle” as a construction, and by enhancing and embellishing previously composed messages, a tactic that positions her simply as a mediating nodal point, a sysadmin with only partial write permissions. So, too, a basic or plain language always in some sense strives, or presumes to, erase the signature of the user-transmitter, with its attendant fallacy of neutrality and universality.</p>
<p>M[ez]ang.elle tends toward a linguistic minimalism as well. Like the idiolect of mobiles, pagers, IRCs, and IMs, it is laconic and often cryptic to the uninitiated eye. (She names an earlier incarnation of her net.wurk writing as “abbreviated geek speak” in “Non Compos Mentis.”) It filters out the non-essential or peripheral `noise’ in a communicative exchange (often an email or chat) and distills it down to a set of core or basic elements, often singularly syllabic. Having extended William Strunk’s rule 13 on brevity, “Omit Needless Words” to include needless letters as well, Mez is similarly left with space and time usually filled with repetitive units (<span class="booktitle">Elements of Style</span> viii). M[ez]ang.elle is in this sense “ez.” However, it is not concise, and even the principle of compositional simplicity and shortness is reformulated such that “conceptual” is introduced as a bracketed regular expression in one of Mez’s many comments on her own method:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">&lt;In short, the KISS princ[ess]able has some me[z]rit<br />
&lt;Keep It Simple Stupid.<br />
&lt;:In my case, it should read:<br />
&lt;Keep it [conceptual and] Sizzlingly Short</p>
<p>In the same email interview, Mez remarked further on the succinct, elemental, and compacted quality of mezangelle with particular reference to its medium and the online environment:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Obviously the medium of hypertext lends itself readily to the minimal…minimal in terms of a primary reliance on the most basic elements - text, screen [`doc swapping’] and image. My laconic use of these most base.hic[!] elements [or elle-E,ments as i would say if responding via regular mez/nschine communication channels] is governed largely by the need to condense/dilute.refresh wordage and imagery meanings/established codes/cues of associative meaning/s. (“The Art of M[ez]ang.elle.ing”)</p>
<p>But mezangelle and Mez herself demonstrate a significant skepticism about the idea of plain or basic English and the principle of the “basic” in user-interface development: the mandate that the interface be immediately, uniformly, and universally legible for the general user. In this regard, it is worth noting that the designer of the user interface for the operating system of the PalmPilot, Rob Haitani, claims that GUI designers need first and foremost to think in terms of economy and basic communicability as these principles have been taught in American writing courses for much of the twentieth century: “I say if you only read one book to understand handheld user interface, it should be Strunk and White’s <span class="booktitle">The Elements of Style</span> ” (<span class="booktitle">Information Appliances</span> 94). Mez’s own skepticism about the idea of “plain English,” however, comes through in her ironic commentary on the number of emails that insist that she “just speak plain English” and start making sense (<span class="booktitle">Streetpress</span> interview). The ideal net.art, Mez notes in a related conversation, “makes me unsure of the very principles that govern the interface/project [and]… throws a reliance on hackneyed dataface terminology out the window” (rhizome.org interview).</p>
<p>Her own mangling of the interface attempts to interrupt and impede, rather than facilitate, the direct conveyance of information and the smooth operation of the circuits of transmission. To obstruct the felicitous transmission of data, she interjects signals such as the punctuating elements of code into her words. Such is it the case, then, that the mania hovering at the edges of her “data bleeding” texts is the mania that comes with a lack of a filtering mechanism, when signs and signals are everywhere and semiotic associations cannot be curtailed: “[Meaning code: if narrative is essential to comprehension, then TTT is not for you. Turn reading `off’ and filter `on.’ If, on the other hand, you enjoy dream sequences/sequentials, reverse the last.]” (Puzzle Pieces of a Datableede Jigsaw”). Mezangelle, then, is marked by both over-determination and a lack of determination. In this respect one could oppose the conceptual underpinnings of Mez’s codework to what Clement Greenberg named as the “modernist reduction,” the production of presumably elementary and elemental, understandable, and directly transmitted art. Mez’s intervention is instead to offer movement from relative clarity to obscurity, risking confusion in the interest of producing complexity in the ordinary sense of the word. Mezangelle leaves us with two poles of interference: complexity, whereby the text assemblages are excessively opaque and overloaded, and the basic, whereby the semiotic units are so abbreviated as to be enigmatic and at times indecipherable and the text assemblages are so excessively minimal that they fade into the screen with a kind of erasure (e.g. her horizontal alignment of the dot or the dash). It makes perfect conceptual sense, then, that the common complaint about Mez’s work is that it is impossible to know what the signs signify and that mezangelle thus hinders its own functionality and transmission.</p>
<p>The dialectic between the plain and the ordinary and the complex might profitably be understood in the terms Walter Benjamin set down with reference to mass media: information and stories. Information is ephemeral, closed, and “shot through with explanation,” while stories are enigmatic, open, complex, and self-interfering. The power of Benjamin’s analysis lies in its appreciation of complexity and difficulty, and in its allowance for the disruption of a putatively closed system of language and communication. In broad terms, <a class="outbound" href="http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/ezines/passages/passages2.html">Will Alexander</a> works with a similar dialectic in his poetic analysis of early online discourse, which, he implicitly suggests, epitomizes the concept of information articulated by Benjamin: “the generic cyberspace adherent, tainted by brutality and boredom….One becomes existentially benumbed by the ease in `checking stockquotes’, in `ordering office supplies.’ ” Because of their material situation within such an environment of mass communication, codework practitioners and critics stress that codework texts and practices gesture toward, and even offers us a glimpse of, a new mode of cognition and textual engagement, libratory in the sense that it counters this precise preference for easily transmissible information that comes already `shot through with explanation.’ Thus, for codeworkers who operate within this paradigm of mass media, awakening from the intellectual freeze, remaining cognizant, and countering the automated response is not facilitated by the silence of an artwork but by its noise, by its confrontation of silence, perhaps even by its disordered syntax, rhythm, and spelling. The continuous disequilibrium codework strives to produce might also be understood in the context of Victor Shklovsky’s account of the power of poetic language to make the familiar strange, to produce a “a disordering which cannot be predicted” (24).</p>
<p>Offering their own version of defamiliarized, poetic language, Mez, NN, Warnell, and other codeworks tend not to favor integration, sequence, organization, order, and connectivity (the province of database aesthetics) but disruption and counter-organization (the province of email performance and Internet `happenings’). Although the performance paradigm can be brought to bear on codework, hypertext, and cybertext, it is particularly apposite for codework, an artistic practice often performed through mailing lists such as Webartery, Wryting, Poetics, and Nettime and thereby functioning as a kind of “happening.” For Mez’s art and writing, the political purpose of this aesthetic practice is to imagine a disordering, interruption, and disturbance of the economy of informational transaction. Warnell’s garbling of American business English in the code poem, <a class="outbound" href="http://warnell.com/real/slanguag.htm">SLANGUAGEÑØÂÃÎ</a>, also literalizes this theme of the disruption of functionalist communicative action and the uninterrupted flow of information. In this text, Warnell treats American business English as a kind of unnatural language, which he interfuses with “international” alphabetic characters and the numerical elements of code, and from which he removes letters so as to render the resulting memorandum even more compressed and functionalist. That is, he realizes the logic of this mode of international communication and business language, which is to prioritize function over form and communicate a message without considering style or craft. The strategy for this poem and for a mezangelled poem is to disturb, disorient, and defamiliarize, to shift “the units of information and communication from the usual and expected to the cryptic” (rhizome.org interview).</p>
<p>So, as another example of the claims for the political potentiality of codework, Mez stresses that her practice - mezangelle - disrupts the apparently seamless surface of mediatized mass communication and expresses an aesthetic of interference rather than transmission. Specifically, she purports to use her language to expose and critique the politics of or within putatively neutral, functionalist programming codes. In this sense Mezangelle, NN/Antiorp/Integer’s code language, and hacking languages alike exist not to function but materially to disrupt the operations of machinic communication and also to produce an awareness of the manipulations and changes within contemporary language. Beatrice Beaubien concurs and suggests that Mez and Netochka Nezvanova are illustrative of a “new paradigm of net communication” in that they create “phrases that disrupt, sometimes gently, empathetically sensual, sometimes violently, abrasively” (“mez|||net|!|zen - Net Fr!sson” 1). It is certainly the case that many readers find their texts perplexing because they violate traditional conventions of language. They are further perplexing because they invite, on the one hand, the assimilative relation of codework practices to prior practices of experimental art and writing. On the other hand, however, these codework texts thwart this apperceptive link to prior textual encounters and engagements, again not necessarily because of their basic form but because of their context and their relation to that context - which itself links the generative material substrate and the mechanism used for transmission.</p>
<p>Mez’s claim is that her codework practice needs to be thought in terms of “a gradual re-educative filtration process” that will teach the reader-users “to recognize the source-modes and compile their sensory abilities along the lines of newly-produced expressions intimately related to the stuff of net.wurked life.” <cite id="note_^21">Mez Nettime listserv post, “The Dynamics of a Code.Wurk Meaning Trajectory” (January 3, 2002). The opening of the “data bleeding texts,” which asks for the reader’s childhood nickname as a mode of address, suggests that we are once again to be formally and institutionally brought into language (we could add, as another example, the use of the blackboard in Memmott’s <a class="outbound" href="http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/hypermedia/talan_memmott/index.html">Lexia to Perplexia</a>).</cite> Such a cognitive disturbance is also partly facilitated by Mez’s use of dynamic text elements, such as one can find in her critically acclaimed <a class="outbound" href="http://netwurkerz.de/mez/datableed/complete/index.htm">data][h!][bleeding texts</a>.</p>
<p>Since the codework texts I am referring to here employ code as a signifier, it is certainly the case that reading them makes one alert to different components of reading, specifically to both the writer’s use of programming languages - the uncompiled script processed by human operators - and the computer’s execution of the compiled script. In essence, one pedagogic end game suggested by Mez’s work and statements of principle is that the reader-users will learn to process the meaning of some elements of code: a handful of operators, instructions, and characters. Another pedagogic end game suggested by Mez’s work is that the reader-users will learn to process a somewhat-new, hybrid, shorthand language (and its semantic, syntactic, orthographic, and orthoëpic conventions) made possible by the digital technologies and now ubiquitous within the realms of advertising, journalistic print culture, and visual media. In the interest of facilitating a kind of oppositional literacy, then, the practice of mezangelle aims to jam the overloaded lines and awaken those that lie dormant; or, as Mez herself declares, it moves “through the neural in waves, swarming into active channels, critically hitting inactive potentials” (“Puzzle Pieces of a Datableede Jigsaw”). This claim regarding shifts in literacy practices is pursued in the critical discourse about Mez’s work; for example, in a short analysis, <a class="outbound" href="http://califia.hispeed.com/Dac/dali.htm">Stephanie Strickland</a> argues that the reading processes that mezangelle requires and the “simultaneity of reference” that it produces “tests fixed neuronal patterns.”</p>
<p>Mez’s work is conceptual and, like many that of many digital and minimalist artists alike, in its web-based, javascript-enhanced form, it requires a somatically engaged mode of perception. That is, the movement and activity of the viewer produces the meaning of the work and the work itself. Specifically, Mez’s textual performances ask that the reader-user intermittently captures, processes, transmits, and even introduces data streams, all of which may themselves have different rhythms and tempos. Similarly, the poet Jim Rosenberg and rich.lit author Talan Memmott both construct complex, densely layered textual fields that are only legible once the layers are drawn apart with the mouse, but mouse movements can also dissolve the texts back into illegibility. These writers and codeworkers quite often present texts that are less concerned with offering a reading experience than they are with working with the language of code to offer comments on form and the materiality of language. Some representative texts will often gain a greater complexity and obfuscation with each mouse click; rather than moving into clarity the text moves into a greater visual and verbal opacity. <cite id="note_^22">One example of the inverse style is Thom Swiss, <a class="outbound" href="http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/currents/fall01/word">The Narrative You Anticipate You May Produce</a>, which invites the reader-user to mouse-over and arrange the layers and words such that they move from density and obscurity to legibility.</cite> When we use the mouse to change the speed or visual orientation of one of Mez’s permeable net.wurked text installations such as the <a class="outbound" href="http://netwurkerz.de/mez/datableed/complete/index.htm">data][h!][bleeding texts</a> or <a class="outbound" href="http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/netwurker/">_][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode_</a>. and cause the text to fluctuate between states of legibility and illegibility, we engage in a complex mode of cognitive and physical interaction with the divergent and convergent currents of information within a networked environment.</p>
<p>Codework languages, for Mez and other writers, thus have both artistic and political potential. Part of the mezangelle codework project is to awaken us to - also to comment upon and recompile - the varied and various data streams that we engage, filter, and disregard while multi-tasking. She frames her texts accordingly as “residual traces from net.wurk practices that thrive, react and shift according 2 fluctuations in the online environment in which they][initially][gestated” (“Announcing The Net.Wurk Series”). If “net.wurked” life requires a cognitive adaptation and naturalization to the machine, her “net.wurk” aims to disrupt its disciplinary and regulatory “sensory reverberations” and offer instead an “infoalert”: informatic reverberations that shock and thus gesture toward new, and potentially liberatory, modes of cognition. Within its specific online environment, then, digital media experimental writing, and specifically Mez’s codework, offers us a glimpse of a mode of reading, cognition, consciousness, and even pedagogical praxis that is not yet fully available to us.</p>
<p>We can take the practice of codework this far but there are certain limitations that we have to acknowledge: codeworkers such as Mez see their work as facilitating new sensory abilities and new modes of textual engagement and cognition, a claim that is generally true to the extent that a new cognition is embedded in every language. However, at least since Fredric Jameson’s hypothesizing about the new form of “consciousness” required to perceive certain postmodern art forms such as the multiple screens of Nam June Paik in their totality, while still recognizing relational differences, the claim for newness is by this point simply part of the genre (31). That is, there is an incontrovertible tendency in contemporary digital art and media work to speak about the facilitation of new modes of cognitive processing and cognitive experience in terms that far exceed the phenomenological. We might note, too, that the claims for newness never really specify whether the “infoalert” as such is embedded into the codework text, or whether it instead emerges as an effect of reading. Further, the claim for a radically different or adaptive cognitive process goes beyond both what the codework texts actually achieve and what we really know about the operations of the brain: in this sense the claim cannot specifically be supported. While the discourse of newness has been made systemic for the practice of digital textuality - new browsers, new processors, new coding languages all purportedly present us with greater possibilities - and while the claim for newness has historically helped to legitimate it, the question of newness is perhaps beside the point in this instance, and at the very least, the province of neurobiology.</p>
<p>Instead, literary and cultural critics should ask both how good and how transformative a “new” mode of cognition would be. In what sense is it important? Would it, or does it, truly offer emancipatory power? To what extent does it lead us toward a synthesis of aesthetic formalism and socio-cultural critique? Given that these questions remain open, as we continue to move beyond an articulation of the principles and properties of codework and work toward the next stage of critical engagement, we need to strike a balance between the limits that codework has reached and the future that it is working toward - its poetic and political aims.</p>
<p>While codework in its many varieties is theorized as both craft and praxis, we are still presented with a radical schism between formal aestheticism and socio-cultural politics (a schism also inherent to the whole field of software art, as Florian Cramer notes <cite id="note_^23">See Florian Cramer, <a class="outbound" href="http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/writings/software_art/concept_notations">Concepts, Notations, Software, Art</a> (March 23, 2002), on “software formalism vs. software culturalism.” Also see Cramer’s co-authored juror comments for the read_me 1.2 software art festival: “very few of the pieces submitted had any political or activist usefulness, although several pretended to.” Olga Goriunova, “read_me 1.2 winners and honorary mentions,” Nettime post (May 22, 2002).</cite> ). It might be read, on the one hand, as a kind of hyper-aestheticism, devoid of political content and significance, and as a techno-formalist fixation on code, a purely functional programming experiment not elevatable to the status of art and not capable of generating literary affect. But so, too, is might be read as a practice expressive of radical cultural politics. Many codework practitioners indeed stress the socio-cultural significance, potential, and content, of their work. They claim, in sum, that codework expresses a revolutionary sensibility within the corporatized environment of IT by turning a pragmatic language toward aesthetic purposes; by issuing manifestos on cultural, political and aesthetic themes; by further complicating our postmodern understanding of authorship; and by articulating an anti-aesthetic, anti-bourgeois code of ethical writing practices. For example, McKenzie Wark has joined with Mez, Sondheim, and Memmott in suggesting that codework’s politics derives partly from its approach to writing as a complex, collaborative, multi-faceted activity, one practical component that allows for the claims for codework as an emancipatory aesthetic-political practice.</p>
<p>Sondheim and others also suggest that codework’s politics are clearly manifest in the genre’s thematization of subjectivity, identity, and the body. They raise the issue of gendered agency, for example, or theorize text as flesh and introduce the problematic of abjection in order to think through the permeation of the boundaries between texts and discourses, or violations of the threshold between code and text. The linguistic-code divide, then, is conceptualized as a binary between the organic and the inorganic and as a binary between flesh and text. Warnell’s dialogic tribute to Sondheim, <a class="outbound" href="p://warnell.com/real/niku.htm">Niku Codepo</a>, evolves from Sondheim’s idea that “surface content” might be thought “as parasitic or/ flesh (Niku) covering the bones or workings of things.” Continuing in the same vein, Warnell presents <a class="outbound" href="p://warnell.com/real/niku.htm">Niku Codepo</a> ‘s decomposing body…subsumed by an “emerging skeletal structure,” an anthropomorphizing metaphor for ergodic code that suggests anatomic depth and interiority. These code depths, though, have erupted on the surface, parasitically inhabiting and re-encoding, as it were, the flesh and organs. Suggesting also an architectural arrangement, with code as the skeleton underlying, and disturbing, organic, decaying flesh and the interface as face, this metaphor does not quite present a binary between the corporeal and the machinic. Rather, code is presented as machinic bones, with the two layers, or elements, of flesh and code interfused, as Mez’s “skin code” texts also imply.</p>
<p>In that it brings components of code to the surface and intermingles the characters of natural and machine languages, this strain of codework presents a fusion at the level of language, substituting for, and functioning as, the figure of the cyborg. Like the cyborg, codework violates the categorical and epistemological boundaries between the organic and the inorganic, the public and the private, the visible and the hidden. The critical door that opens here - with the cyborg’s and codework’s fusion of the organic and the inorganic - allows for a reconsideration of post-human subjectivity, and it also allows for our consideration of another kind of synthesis. If we reduce the practice of codework to either its form or its content, we would produce a false, and falsely reductive, binary between aesthetics and politics. Criticism and the arts alike have the capacity to synthesize the two aspects, without neglecting either formal or socio-cultural analysis, by building on the set of relations that are nascent within the discourses of codework and net.art. Written out as “code.work,” as with `net.art,’ `code’ would be the object and `work’ would be the property that is transferable to other contexts. Codework, in other words, contains within itself the means to theorize it as aesthetic craft and political practice.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Portions of this essay were presented at the Digital Cultures Research Group “Interfacing Knowledge” Conference, UC Santa Barbara (March 2002); the Technotopias Conference, University of Strathclyde (July 2002); and the trAce Incubation Conference, Nottingham Trent University (July 2002). Maria Damon, Katherine Hayles, Jennifer Jones, Alan Liu, Talan Memmott, Chris Newfield, and Alan Sondheim made particularly helpful comments. Thanks to Russell Samolsky, Timothy Wager, and Joseph Tabbi for incisive editorial suggestions.</span></p>
<h2>notes</h2>
<h2>Bibliography - codework</h2>
<p>Alexander, Will. <a class="outbound" href="http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/ezines/passages/passages2.html">“The Myrmidons of Oblivion”</a> (April 2000).</p>
<p>Baudrillard, Jean. “Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual Reality.” Jean Baudrillard: Art and Artifact. Ed. Nicholas Zurbrugg. London: SAGE, 1997. 19-27.</p>
<p>Beaubien, Beatrice. “mez|||net|!|zen - Net Fr!sson.” <span class="booktitle">American Book Review</span> 22:6 (September/October 2001): 3-4.</p>
<p>Beiguelman, Giselle. “Liquid Texts.” <span class="booktitle">Leonardo Electronic Almanac</span> 10: 8 (August 2002).</p>
<p>Bergman, Eric, ed. <span class="booktitle">Information Appliances</span>. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2000.</p>
<p>Carl Andre Hollis Frampton <span class="booktitle">12 Dialogues 1962-1963</span>. New York: NYU Press, 1981.</p>
<p>Cayley, John. “The Code Is Not the Text (Unless It Is the Text).” <span class="booktitle">Electronic Book Review</span> (September 2002).</p>
<p>Cox, Geoff, Alex McLean, and Adrian Ward. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.generative.net/papers/aesthetics">“The Aesthetics of Generative Code.”</a> Web-published paper.</p>
<p>Cramer, Florian. <a class="outbound" href="http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/writings/net_literature/permutations/kassel_2000/combinatory_poetry.html"></a> “Combinatory Poetry and Literature in the Internet” (October 19, 2000). Dec 19, 2000, Forum Ästhetik digitaler Literatur, Universität GHK Kassel online: dichtung digital (Roberto Simanowksi, ed.).</p>
<p>—. <a class="outbound" href="http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps43/cramer/ooooo.html">“Digital Code and Literary Text.”</a> <span class="booktitle">BeeHive</span> 4:3 (Fall 2001).</p>
<p>—. “Software Art and Writing.” <span class="booktitle">American Book Review</span> 22:6 (September-October 2001): 8.</p>
<p>—. <a class="outbound" href="http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/writings/net_literature/code_poetry/cream_2001/code_poetry_cream.txt"></a> “Program Code Poetry.” <span class="booktitle">Cream</span>: Net.art newsletter (Mar 28, 2001). Ed. Josephine Bosma.</p>
<p>—. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.netzliteratur.net/cramer/concepts_notations_software_art.html">“Concepts, Notations, Software, Art”</a> (March 23, 2002).</p>
<p>—. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.digitalcraft.org/">“Language, A Virus?”</a> <span class="booktitle">I Love You: The Catalogue</span>. Digital Craft exhibition.</p>
<p>Esdaile, Scott. “The Net.Wurk Series _][ad]Dressed in a Skin C.ode_.” Nettime posting (April 17, 2002). Reprinted from <a class="outbound" href="http://www.msstate.edu/Fineart_Online/Backissues/Vol_16/faf_v16_n04/text/mez.html">fine Arts forum</a>.</p>
<p>Jameson, Frederic. <span class="booktitle">Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism</span>. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.</p>
<p>Johnston, David. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.year01.com/issue10/programmer_poet.html">“Programming as Poetry.”</a> <span class="booktitle">Year01 Forum</span> (April 12, 2002).</p>
<p>LaCook, Lewis. “Rot and Root.” Suite101.com (February 22, 2002). Available: <a href="http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/15239/89610">http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/15239/89610</a>.</p>
<p>Lennon, Brian. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.ekac.org/brilensec.html">“Screening a Digital Visual Poetics.”</a> <span class="booktitle">Configurations</span> 8:1 (2000): 63-85.</p>
<p>Memmott, Talan. “E_RUPTURE://Codework”.”Serration in Electronic Literature.” <span class="booktitle">American Book Review</span> 22:6 (September/October 2001): 1, 6.</p>
<p>Mez. Nettime Announcements listserv post, “Announcing The Net.Wurk Series::_][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode_ + JavaMuseum - [mez] solo show.” February 3, 2002.</p>
<p>—. rhizome.org interview with Josephine Bosma (February 1, 2000).</p>
<p>Mez Breeze. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.fineartforum.org/Backissues/Vol_15/faf_v15_n05/text/feature.html">“Non Compos Mentis: Zen-Tripping the Non-Conference Circuitry.”</a> <span class="booktitle">fine art forum</span> 15:5 (May 2001).</p>
<p>Rosenberg, Jim. <span class="booktitle">Cybertext Yearbook 2002</span>. Eds. Loss Pequeño Glazier and John Cayley. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2003 (forthcoming). 3 pp. manuscript.</p>
<p>Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique.” <span class="booktitle">Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays</span>. Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965. 3-24.</p>
<p>Sondheim, Alan. “Introduction: Codework.” <span class="booktitle">American Book Review</span> 22:6 (September/October 2001): 1, 4.</p>
<p>Steidl, Jutta. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.digitalcraft.org/?artikel_id293">“If () then ()”</a>. <span class="booktitle">I Love You: The Catalogue</span>. Digital Craft exhibition.</p>
<p>Strunk, William, Jr. and E.B. White. <span class="booktitle">The Elements of Style</span>. New York: Macmillan Co., 1959.</p>
<p>Warnell, Ted. <a class="outbound" href="http://warnell.com/real/nari.htm">_Poems by Nari: Visual Poetry from the Cyberstream_</a>.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/code">code</a>, <a href="/tags/codetext">codetext</a>, <a href="/tags/materiality">materiality</a>, <a href="/tags/programm">programm</a>, <a href="/tags/mez">mez</a>, <a href="/tags/memmott">memmott</a>, <a href="/tags/richlit">rich.lit</a>, <a href="/tags/warnell">warnell</a>, <a href="/tags/brian-lennon">brian lennon</a>, <a href="/tags/john-cayley">john cayley</a>, <a href="/tags/antye-greie-fuchs">Antye Greie-Fuchs</a>, <a href="/tags/jessica-loseby">Jessica Loseby</a>, <a href="/tags/autopoiesis">autopoiesis</a>, <a href="/tags/emergen">emergen</a>, <a href="/tags/aesthetic">aesthetic</a>, <a href="/tags/jutta-steidl">Jutta Steidl</a>, <a href="/tags/geoff-cox">Geoff Cox</a>, <a href="/tags/alex-mclean">Alex McLean</a>, <a href="/tags/adrian-ward">Adrian Ward</a>, <a href="/tags/generative">generative</a>, <a href="/tags/ellen-ullman">Ellen Ullman</a>, <a href="/tags/oulipo">oulipo</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator809 at http://electronicbookreview.comMister Smathershttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/wuc/story
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Harry Mathews</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2000-01-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Late in the summer of my eleventh year, I decided to butcher our neighbors’ Afghan hound. One afternoon I went out to stalk him as he prowled around backyards, hoping to lure him with a red plastic bowl full of sugared water that had been laced with poison. I caught up with him just when he’d soiled our very own cosmos patch, an event that was actually a bright spot in the proceedings because it justified them. He wasn’t a mean dog, or a bright dog, just a soiler. Hence my longing to butcher him. There was another reason. He not only soiled sidewalks and gardens: he embarrassed me again and again with his great stalk of a penis. It was as though he waited till I was near him to start making water, he would lift his leg and brandish his dong as if it were some kind of lure, a lure meant for me, when it was anything but a lure, it made me blush and squirm and yearn to dissolve in the bright summer haze.</p>
<p>I was standing there, after setting down the bowl of water in the dog’s general vicinity, when the butcher, who was passing by, stopped and looked at me. He had a stalk of alfalfa in his teeth, a stalk quivering green against the red and white of his soiled smock. I suddenly felt hungry looking at that smock soiled with the blood of pigs and beeves, something that I knew shouldn’t normally lure a boy like me. The butcher, chewing on his stalk, asked me what I was doing. “You don’t look exactly bright standing there like some kind of drooping asshole.”</p>
<p>I turned to the butcher and indicated the nosing dog, now approaching the red bowl of water. I said, “You got any idea what’s in that bowl of water? Sugar and rat poison.”</p>
<p>The butcher glanced around. Did he notice our soiled flower bed? In any case, when I asked him, “By the way, how do you butcher a big dog like him?,” it was as though a lure of spellbinding fascination had risen before the butcher’s eyes. His gaze grew almost frighteningly bright, his mouth opened and the spittle-spotted stalk of alfalfa started sliding down his smock. I pointed this out to him. “The stalk - “</p>
<p>“Fuck the stalk, sonny. First thing we gotta do is get rid of that water. No way to eat the fella if his meat’s all soiled with rat stuff. I’ll go fetch a nice bone, we’ll lure him over with that, I’ll get an icepick to fix his brain, then we can butcher him together. I’m no slouch as a dog-butcher, believe me. I’ve stalked dachshunds in Central Park in my time. With a turd for lure.”</p>
<p>I started making water in my pants. Even my socks were soiled. I’d never guessed the butcher was so bright.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/oulipo">oulipo</a>, <a href="/tags/dong">dong</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator647 at http://electronicbookreview.comLiteral Arthttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/programmatology
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">John Cayley</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-11-29</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>“The Pixel/The Line” was our rubric, a constructive irritant for the statement that follows. It implies, for me, an “and/or,” a contrast/linkage, a characteristically problematic relationship between graphic art and what I now call literal art. Moreover, since “line” is ambiguous, and “pixel” less so, it inclines toward an equally characteristic and underlying assumption that graphic art is predominant in certain contexts, including this context, that of digital cultural production.<cite id="note_1" class="note">Graphic art in this context and others allows a continuity with visual art, fine art, and even conceptual and performance art; the relationship of verbal or literal art to these other practices remains problematic.</cite></p>
<p>“Pixel” is unambiguously associated with digital graphics. Moreover, on the terminal screens of digital media, pixels are used to build up the images of letters. The “atoms” of one system of digital transcription – graphics – provide, in this context, a preferred delivery medium for the atoms of another – writing. But apart from what is perhaps yet another opportunity for graphic art to patronise applied grammatology, it is not usually understood that there is any great significance or affect that accrues from this “BIOS-level” process of programmatological generation. After all, do constraints that are imposed on the manipulation of pixels in order that they produce the outlines of letters tell us anything about those letters or the words which they, in turn, compose?</p>
<p>Now contrast/link certain circumstances pertaining to the line. Lines may also, of course, be graphic elements; yet here, I assume, we are reading them as “lines” as in “lines of text” or “lines of verse”: conventional units of writing, with delineated and potentially elaborated sense. A line is a string of letters, and letters are the “atoms” of textual materiality. Letters build words and lines in a manner that allows far greater significance and affect to emerge from modulation in processes of compositional or programmatological generation. By this I mean simply that the way my algorithms and I string letters together to make words and lines generates significance and affect far more quickly and with far greater cultural moment than the way my algorithms and I string pixels together. Like the difference between <span class="lightEmphasis">changing the style of your font</span> and chngng th wy y spll or chaynjing thuh way u spehl.</p>
<p>Even this minute example reveals what I believe are profound differences in the way that our culture treats pixel and line. Note that rearranging the pixels of the words above engages considerations which are aesthetic and paratextual, matters of style, taste, mode, and so forth. all of which are undeniably meaningful and inalienably linked to the overall significance of, in this case, a phrase, a line, a fragmentary cultural object: <span class="lightEmphasis">changing the style of your font</span>.</p>
<p>By contrast, even rule-governed manipulations of letters in a cultural object of similar form, “size” and “weight,” immediately evoke notions of legibility, error, and appropriateness; and any aesthetic effects of this literal programming may be stunned by these considerations, which are, as I suggest, of greater cultural moment.<cite id="note_2" class="note">In case the rules are not obvious, they are: (1) spell without vowels and (2) folk-phonetic, or popular-language-guide spelling.</cite></p>
<p>Paradoxically, or perhaps for these very reasons, the programmatological and, specifically, algorithmic manipulation of pixels – to generate or modulate images as such (including the images of letters) – is undertaken with a far better grasp of the significance of such manipulation. <cite id="note_3" class="note">Because it is less directly engaged with signification; more a matter of inflecting acts of signification (although necessarily in a meaningful way).</cite> We all know, for example, what is suggested by algorithmic “blurring” as applied to an image, including the image of a word – it doesn’t change the word, it “softens” it, or whatever.<cite id="note_4" class="note">Of course, in discussions of rhetoric there is explicit appreciation of language tropes similar to “blurring,” for example. In fact, my “or whatever” here is a minute but effective blurring filter.</cite> With text, there is as yet no accepted repertoire of algorithmic manipulations from, for example, letter to word to line. An important task for writing in programmable media is to address these difficulties and disjunctions. Interaction with text must be founded on its specific materiality, on literal art.<cite id="note_5" class="note">For the materiality of language, of the symbolic, as it is here invoked, I recommend returning to Michel Foucault (1972), <span class="booktitle">The Archaeology of Knowledge</span>. Foucault is here working towards a definition of the statement in discourse and, while so doing, he makes clear the necessary difficulties and paradoxes of the materiality of language. Rejecting as its ground both any ideal underlying the statement, and the material of media that delivers statements, he characterises this substance as a “repeatable materiality,” one that depends on “possibilities of reinscription and transcription.” “The statement cannot be identified with a fragment of matter; but its identity varies with a complex set of material institutions.” In a sense the materiality of language arises from the fact of its being treated as an object that we “produce, manipulate, use, transform, exchange, combine, decompose and recompose and possibly destroy.” I would paraphrase this by saying that the materiality of language is a function of its programmability.</cite></p>
<p>The world of letters has played a crucial role in the development of digital art and culture. Text is indeed “the web’s primary and foundational media”<cite id="note_6" class="note">From Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s introductory remarks to SIGGRAPH 2001, panel AG1000, “The Pixel/The Line: Approaches to interactive text.”</cite> and the artists of text are poets. At first “poetic” does not seem promising as a preferred characterisation for a literary or literal art practice that shares in the critical challenges presented by so-called new media. Poets and their poems are the old “geniuses” and “masters” of both Enlightenment and Romance, not to mention High Modernism. But as a matter of recent historical fact, from Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de Des” to Jim Rosenberg’s “Intergrams” or Brian Kim Stefans’ “The Dream Life of Letters,” it is in the field of poetry and poetics that we have seen the most consistent and radical critical engagement with literal art. This argues that, in verbal art, if you wish to pursue a practice that might ally with that of contemporary digital art, then you would be wise to take a lead, or at the very least some cognisance, of contemporary poetics. However, I am making a stronger case, suggesting that poetics provides a preferred and even paradigmatic underlying or critical framework for what is currently called digital art, digital cultural production.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">*</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="lightEmphasis">Literal rather than digital art. Poetic practice informed by the materiality of language has greater power to articulate cultural production than ill-defined digital practice</span>.</p>
<p>I want to call attention to the bald abstraction and inadequate definition of the term “digital.” In general usage, the contrasting “literal” is a fairly flat term, associated either with letters themselves or with minimal, straightforwardly lexical relationships between linguistic signs and their potential significance. <cite id="note_7" class="note">Note that this is precisely what is disrupted by the rule-governed and entirely construable manipulation of letter arrangements in the tiny example above.</cite> By contrast, “digital” seems, shall we say, far more exciting and diverse. Why so? At best, in its literal sense, it pretends to point to the materiality of the media it addresses. In practice, it is usually a placeholder, a way of bringing together a diverse range of work, and then lending that work a gloss of novelty and innovation which is more often an accident of association with the hardware and systems on which the work is played out.</p>
<p>In <span class="booktitle">The Digital Dialectic</span>, edited by Peter Lunenfeld (1999), there is, of course, a more concerted attempt to define the digital, in digital systems that “do not use continuously variable representational relationships. Instead, they translate all input into binary structures of 0s and 1s, which can then be stored, transferred, or manipulated at the level of numbers…” (Lunenfeld 1999, xv). He then relates this to certain qualities of production in digital culture, exemplified through a contrast with analog photography: the digital is “stepped” (because of pixels) and “crisp.” He somewhat fudges the relationship of digital to the overarching project of “new media.”</p>
<p>For him the latter term is the placeholder struggling for its paradigm-position with “postmodernism” and others. In terms of media discourse analysis, the telling point in his extended definition is a necessary statement of what seems obvious: “As all manner of representational systems are recast as digital information, they can all be stored, accessed, and controlled <span class="lightEmphasis">by the same equipment</span> ” (Lunenfeld 1999, xvi [my emphasis]). This is manifestly now the case. All of the recording technologies discovered and developed since the late 19th century are digitized and therefore mutually transparent at the level of 0s and 1s. But what does this tell us about the <span class="lightEmphasis">qualities</span> rather than the <span class="lightEmphasis">facilities</span> of digital media?</p>
<p>I have proposed an alternate and more critically-theoretical generative definition of the digital. For me digital characterises any system of transcription with a finite set of agreed identities as its elements.<cite id="note_8" class="note">More fundamental elements in such a system may of course combine into larger entities and thus generate hierarchies of lower- and higher-order sets of composite elements.</cite> It follows that such a system allows: (1) programmatological manipulation of its constitutive elements (without any threat to their integrity); (2) invisible or seamless editing of cultural objects composed from these elements; and (3) what we now call digital (“perfect”) reproduction of such objects.<cite id="note_9" class="note">You can make a simple test to decide if you are dealing with digital system. Can you perform any of the above three operations? Are you sure that you are dealing with a system composed of quanta? Compare also the fundamental operations of storage, transfer and (conditional) processing in psychoanalytic thinking.</cite></p>
<p>The point to make here is that literary cultural production in its material manifestation as writing has always already shared these defining qualities of the digital.<cite id="note_10" class="note">See also John Cayley (1998), “Of Programmatology.”</cite> Although what I call programmatological manipulation of the elements of writing’s “digital” system has not often been self-consciously practised prior to the advent of our so-called “digital” age, it was a fully realised potential, as is demonstrated by the existence of, among other things, the <span class="booktitle">Yi Jing</span> (or Chinese Book of Changes), pattern poetry, acrostics, early universal language systems, the endeavors of the OuLiPo, the language of Joyce in <span class="booktitle">Ulysses</span> and <span class="booktitle">Finnegans Wake</span>, the work of Emmett Williams, Jackson Mac Low, John Cage, etc. While all poetic writing might properly be seen as characterised by programmatological manipulation of literal materiality, in practice, especially since the Enlightenment and in the West, poeticising has been received as an inspired flow of organic lines recited from voices of genius. It is, rather, an alternative, radically formal tradition of letters projected from Mallarmé, through Dada into the currency of total syntax and post-Concrete visual poetry which nurtures programmatological literal art, linking to practitioners in so-called new media: Jim Rosenberg, myself, Brian Stefans, Paul Chan, and an increasing number of poetic practitioners gaining access to new tools.</p>
<p>On the other hand, seamless editing and digital reproduction has been an intrinsic and necessary part of literary culture throughout the entire history of writing, which, as a point of fact, depends (as does speech and all language activity) on “digital” reproduction: the eye must distinguish letters, bracket their accidents and recognise them as identities; the ear does the same with phonemes. Although print technology plays an important role in establishing and propagating these identities and the qualities they carry, please note that these “digital” qualities of writing are already present and persistent in any language technology. “Rose is a rose is a rose,” no matter how or where or on what it is written or spoken. The materiality of language establishes a poetic institution on the basis of this exchange.</p>
<p>It follows that the so-called digitization of literary phenomena is trivial and that “digital” is a redundant term (in cultural studies at least). It is used for media that would be better characterised as “literal.”</p>
<p>This may present itself as a ironic circumstance. I may appear to be proposing that we apply critical tools and criteria from a world of relatively conservative cultural authority, from print culture, from alphabetic minds, and attempting to use them to overdetermine our brave new world of networked and programmable media. However, it should be clear from what I’ve said so far that I am concerned with addressing the materiality of the media in question, rather than higher-order critical/theoretical structures. I’m trying, as it were, to turn our attention from lines of verse to the letters of literal art and to place the latter in a significant constructive relationship with the pixels of digital graphic art. My argument is that the material manipulation of pixels derives, culturally, from an underlying gasp of the manipulation of letters.</p>
<p>If the materiality of new media is indeed such a familiar and interiorized literal structure, then what is new about it? The answer to this is fairly clear to me. (1) There is genuine historical novelty and cultural innovation which emerges as a function of the discovery and development – at the end of the 19th century – of light and sound recording technologies. (2) More recently, in a related history that is still in train, we have, progressively, the ability to store, edit, manipulate and reproduce the material of art and culture in any and all of the recording and broadcast media available to us <span class="lightEmphasis">on the same equipment</span>.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">*</p>
<p class="epigraph">There is no software.<br /> – Friedrich A. Kittler (1997)</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">… the unacknowledged programmers of the real…</p>
<p>Friedrich A. Kittler (1990, 1999) and other media discourse analysts have suggested that culture may proceed by recasting or downplaying the materiality of language, and reprogramming its agents and subjects in terms of specific technologies and institutions. Such analyses, for example, “flesh out” the deconstruction of print culture as an expression of Romantic logocentrism. Following on from Foucault (1972), mixing in Lacan, and with passing critical acknowledgement of Derrida, Kittler provides us with documentary media history and sophisticated analyses in which, for example, the problematic of the voice and authority of the poet and (great) writer is engaged with media history: McLuhan with all of the advantages of poststructuralism and poststructuralist psychoanalysis.</p>
<p>As such, Kittler shares (with me, for one) in the project of unravelling the (male) mastery of poetic genius. For Kittler, the “age of print” – epitomized for this East German intellectual as the age of Goethe – was (and to an extent still is) a period when, ironically, technologies of writing achieved what he and others see as a perfected, transparent “alphabetisation,” which then recited or ventriloquized the concepts of authorship, originality, individuality, intellectual “property,” and (male) artistic and intellectual mastery.<cite id="note_11" class="note">See especially the chapters “The Mother’s Mouth” and “Language Channels” in Kittler, <span class="booktitle">Discourse Networks</span>. I am necessarily simplifying complex and rich arguments, which show how - in the discourse network of 1800 - the (maternal) voice reconfigured writing in a process Kittler calls ‘alphabetisation,’ concealing, for example, its literal, combinatorial materiality. “The Mother’s Mouth thus freed children from books. Her voice substituted sounds for letters… The educational goal of children in reading is to speak out the written discourses of others… Lacan’s definition of Woman exactly fits… She doesn’t speak, she makes others speak” (Kittler, <span class="booktitle">Discourse Networks</span> 34-35). “The Mother, or source of all discourse, was at the same time the abyss into which everything written vanished, only to emerge as pure Spirit and Voice” (Kittler, <span class="booktitle">Discourse Networks</span> 54).</cite> My first problem with Kittler’s analyses arises here. “Alphabetisation” is used paradoxically, and as an abusive term to indicate its opposite. In itself, the term unambiguously refers to the materiality of writing, to a popular conception of writing’s constituent structures. However Kittler uses it to refer to a system of inscription (his discourse of 1800) in which this alphabetic materiality has been recast and downplayed by the institution of the poet’s voice. The discrete literal entities of the alphabet have been successfully recited as a “smooth and continuous [analog] flow of personality.”<cite id="note_12" class="note">I owe this formulation to the translators’ introduction in Friedrich A. Kittler (trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz), <span class="booktitle">Gramophone, Film, Typewriter</span> (Kittler 1999, xxii).</cite></p>
<p>Kittler identifies the moment of radical reconfiguration of the discourse network with the moment of discovery and development of new recording technologies: photography (little discussed), gramophone, film. Undoubtedly it was a crucial moment, a moment “When Old Technologies were New,” and surely the jury must still be out over the questions of the significance of this or that technological innovation.<cite id="note_13" class="note">The reference is to Carolyn Marvin (1988), <span class="booktitle">When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century</span>.</cite> However, Kittler allows us to see that it is highly likely that the initial possibilities of: (1) recording and organizing the culture of sound; or of (2) recording and organizing the culture of light; or (3) recording and organizing, as it were, the culture of human time, will prove to be far more significant than the more recent discovery and development of programmable and networked symbol-processing machines. The role of the latter is recast as speed, convenience, manipulation and logistics (and perhaps the final emergence of posthuman culture), whereas the former technologies of 1900 radically altered the phenomenology and practice of so-called human culture.</p>
<p>In the world of language and letters, Kittler (1999) also discovers new writing machines, typified by the typewriter, of which computers are a sort of special case. <cite id="note_14" class="note">Kittler, 1990. See especially the relevant section pp. 183-263.</cite> However, whereas the recording technologies of sound and light lead to entirely new relations with the Real and the Imaginary, the typewriter seems merely to continue to recast or downplay the Symbolic and its materiality, at best further dismantling the voice of the poet by exchanging adoring female recitalists for controlled and controlling machinic female typists. <cite id="note_15" class="note">These are, of course, Lacan’s terms which, to grossly simplify, Kittler aligns with media as such: gramophone and the Real, film and the Imaginary, typewriter and the Symbolic. There are rich arguments and lines of thinking here, far beyond the scope of this paper.</cite> Momentarily, in media history, in <span class="lightEmphasis">verbal</span> art and culture, the materiality of the Symbolic is reasserted, but most clearly for Kittler this is as <span class="lightEmphasis">non</span> sense, the irrationality of arbitrary alphabetic transcription: Dada. For him, the media of symbolic manipulation, the typewriter/computer, including, perhaps, all programming, all software, is about to become machine and machine only: “the symbolic has, through Enigma and COLOSSUS, become a world of the machine.” (Kittler 1999, 262)</p>
<p>Yet it is hard to see how digitisation – by which I mean the digital transcription of any and all recorded data, sampled from the real – will fit into this current media discourse analysis, Kittler’s discourse of 2000. In more than one controversial essay, Kittler seems to show himself as a sort of hardcore reductionist, whose “so-called man” cannot be distinguished from machines that record, store, transfer and process, all with “no software” in the sense that, in the last analysis, there is nothing but “signifiers of voltage differences.” “When meanings come down to sentences, and sentences to words, and words to letters, there is no software at all. Rather there would be no software if computer systems were not surrounded by an environment of everyday languages.” (Kittler 1997, 150)</p>
<p>I have spent a good deal of time on Kittler not only because I believe that his arguments and contributions require attention, but also because I believe he provides us with one of the most sophisticated arguments explaining the most recent recasting and downplaying of the materiality of language, the subordination of line to pixel, in the context of so-called digital art and culture. How can one justify an engagement with verbal art, with language, when symbolic manipulation may be indistinguishable from the machinic symbolic? It’s far too tempting for workers in sound and light to adopt this supposition or to proceed with their work on its basis, in a hypercool posthuman irrational.</p>
<p>Of course, Kittler is concerned not only with media history but questions (after Foucault, 1972) of what, as such, a symbolic system is. If a symbolic system can be a softwareless “so-called man”-less machine, then that is a very significant conclusion. But it is unhelpful to a pragmatics of artistic production. Kittler’s statement that there ” <span class="lightEmphasis">would be</span> no software if computer systems were not surrounded by an environment of everyday languages,” (my emphasis) is crucial and telling. They are so surrounded. It is impossible to so-called-humanly conceive of them otherwise, and to work with, against and amongst them. Not only that, but all the other media, of sound and light, are inside them, or <span class="lightEmphasis">using the same equipment</span> (in more so-called human terms). Under these conditions, we cannot bracket or stun the materiality of language, the materiality of the symbolic, especially since it is our primary interface to the machine, for more than just historical or contingent reasons. The alternative is to abandon rich literal abstraction for the machinic banal or the machinic unconscious or the machinic real.</p>
<p>Linemakers, poets and writers generally, have long lost all claims to a mastery loaned to them by so-called print culture, by the discourse network of 1800. They must once again serve the literal matter of language, and as such they must serve the machine: typewriter, word processor, programmaton. Its <span class="lightEmphasis">literal</span> symbolic materiality should, in turn, be recognised as intrinsically and necessarily, not only historically or momentarily, engaged with the entire gamut of cultural production that emerges from the generalised, networked use of programmable machines. So long as we talk and write over the heads of COLOSSUS, an appreciation of literal art in this sense will enable a more significant and affective analysis of culture than that now accruing from screen-grazing pixelated transcriptions of sound and light in terms of a banal and minimally articulated abstraction: the 0/1 digital.</p>
<h2>Sidebar</h2>
<p><a href="/thread/firstperson/cayleysidebar" class="internal">Sidebar images</a></p>
<h2>Responses</h2>
<p><a href="/thread/firstperson/swoosh" class="internal">Nick Montfort responds</a></p>
<p><a href="/thread/firstperson/disambiguating" class="internal">Johanna Drucker responds</a></p>
<p><a href="/thread/firstperson/compiler" class="internal">John Cayley responds</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/poetry">poetry</a>, <a href="/tags/modernism">modernism</a>, <a href="/tags/mallarme">mallarme</a>, <a href="/tags/jim-rosenberg">jim rosenberg</a>, <a href="/tags/enlightenment">enlightenment</a>, <a href="/tags/brian-kim-stefans">brian kim stefans</a>, <a href="/tags/digital-dialectic">digital dialectic</a>, <a href="/tags/peter-lunenfeld">peter lunenfeld</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodernism">postmodernism</a>, <a href="/tags/yi-jing">yi jing</a>, <a href="/tags/book-changes">book of changes</a>, <a href="/tags/oulipo">oulipo</a>, <a href="/tags/ulysses">ulysses</a>, <a href="/tags/finnegans-wake">finnegans wake</a>, <a href="/tags/emmett-williams">emmett williams</a>, <a href="/tags/jackson-mac-low">jackson mac low</a>, <a href="/tags/john-cage">john cage</a>, <a href="/tags/paul-chan">paul chan</a>, <a href="/tags/friedrich-k">friedrich k</a>, <a href="/tags/friedrich-kittler">friedrich kittler</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1020 at http://electronicbookreview.comhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/programmatology#commentsA User's Guide to the New Millenniumhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/open-source
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Matthew G. Kirschenbaum</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-03-26</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>In 1993, Simon During edited the <span class="booktitle">Cultural Studies Reader</span> for Routledge, a volume that helped consolidate the then-emerging field (and Routledge’s place in it). <span class="booktitle">The New Media Reader</span>, majestically edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort for the MIT Press, will represent an achievement of equal or greater import for the rapidly accreting field of new media and digital studies. Anyone who doubts the necessity of a “reader” for an ostensibly screen-based enterprise is missing the point: as the editors note, new media’s past is to be found among hitherto fragmented and incompatible documentary forms: “on the Web in PDF, in an assortment of anthologies divided by subfields, or in the dusty microfilm files that Vannevar Bush hoped would one day be hooked into the memex.”</p>
<p>Here Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort give us over 800 pages of breakthrough technical papers, theoretical statements, creative manifestos, art pieces, rants, and fictions, effectively open-sourcing dozens of major texts by artists, critics, and technologists. The <span class="booktitle">Reader</span> exists precisely to counter the notion that the whole of the field is always already instantly accessible via Google, and I have no doubt that this collection will quickly become the default text in a variety of curricular settings. This may not be its greatest gift, however: the published volume also comes packaged with a CD-ROM, which contains “working versions of some of the most important new media artifacts ever created…games, tools, digital art, and more – with selections of academic software, independent literary efforts, and home-computer era commercial software.”</p>
<p>I had an opportunity to preview some of this material along with my advance copy of the <span class="booktitle">Reader</span>, and it is indeed an embarrassment of riches: <span class="booktitle">Spacewar</span>!, Weizenbaum’s <span class="booktitle">Eliza</span>, Will Crowther’s <span class="booktitle">Adventure</span>, Atari and Apple games (<span class="booktitle">Karateka</span>, anyone?), early hypertext including lost poems by William Dickey, an anatomy of Stuart Moulthrop’s “Forking Paths,” the programs often accompanied by source code and/or documentation. The value of this aggressive preservation of born-digital objects and artifacts is inestimable, and it seems clear that many more, and more extensive, such efforts will be required in relatively short order.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">The New Media Reader</span> asserts its historicity strongly, and for some this will be either its greatest accomplishment or its most conspicuous shortcoming: there is no selection earlier than 1941 (Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”) or later than 1994 (Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues on the World Wide Web). We have, then, a 50-year snapshot of new media, certainly its most formative 50 years, but clearly the volume is by no means comprehensive. Still, I believe the editors have wisely resisted the temptation to reach too far back (to Babbage and Lovelace, say, or Alberti, or Gutenberg) and turn the collection into a broad-based survey of technology, representation, and culture. <span class="booktitle">The New Media Reader</span> has a more specific agenda: to construct an origin story for new media that is less a narrative than a kind of Möbius strip spun from the interplay between art and computer science in the five decades following the end of the Second World War - from the rise of the Cybernetics Group through the 60s counterculture to personal computing to the gradual decline of stand-alone hypertext and the dawn of networked hypermedia and the Web.</p>
<p>It would be easy to quibble with the individual selections, to fixate on who’s in and who’s out - that seems like an exercise best left for the seminar room, though for my part I will say that I would have liked to have seen the graphic design of David Carson, Neville Brody, and the Cranbrook School represented, design practices that simultaneously celebrated the “end of print” while yielding some of the most outrageously consumptive displays <span class="lightEmphasis">that</span> particular medium has ever tolerated. Likewise, sound (Detroit techno and electronic music, for example) is virtually unrepresented. Other readers with other interests will no doubt find their own gaps and empty spaces. But this belies the import of the intervention the editors clearly seek to make. The volume as a whole may be seen as a dynamic interface, with individual selections functioning as slider bars as readers (or users) choose this or that text to put certain variables into play and manipulate the state of the discourse network: Roy Ascott juxtaposed with Ivan Sutherland, for example, or Donna Haraway with Richard Stallman. Such encounters are in fact encouraged by the volume’s production, which deploys an elaborate system of tabs and cross-referencing devised by designer Michael Crumpton.</p>
<p>Many of the selections (“The Garden of Forking Paths,” the Oulipo group, writings by various technologists, the preponderance of hypertext theory in the final section, the numerous electronic games on the CD) seem to emphasize writing and art-making under conditions of constraint. In this sense the programmatic and algorithmic nature of new media is clearly delineated, with its genealogy in 50s cybernetics and the 60s avant-garde; so we can read Norbert Wiener’s “Men, Machines, and the World About” and then Nam June Paik’s brief but remarkable manifesto “Cybernated Art”: “Newton’s physics is the mechanics of power and the unconciliatory two-party system, in which the strong win over the weak. But in the 1920s a German genius put a third-party (grid) between these two mighty poles (cathode and anode) in a vacuum tube, thus enabling the weak to win over the strong for the first time in human history.” But the radical rupture of cybernetic processes and algorithmic constraint with Newtonian physics and Kantian metaphysics that is everywhere on display here comes (just maybe) at the expense of new media’s debt to other conventions of representation. Nowhere is this more conspicuous than in the absence of William Gibson, whose blowout cyberpunk narratives owed as much (as has been said many times) to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as they did to the video arcades of Vancouver. So, no Gibson, no <span class="booktitle">Myst</span> (with its luscious invocations of codex and print culture), perhaps not enough sense that by the end of the twentieth century new media had an analog as well as a digital range of reference.</p>
<p>The <span class="booktitle">Reader</span> ‘s final selection, as noted above, is an early technical paper on the World Wide Web. On the one hand, it’s clear from even a passing encounter with the texts in <span class="booktitle">The New Media Reader</span> how much the concepts presented by Berners-Lee owe to his predecessors (Bush, Licklidder, Engelbart, Nelson, Shneiderman). Perhaps what this selection does best, then, is dispel the notion that the Web is itself “new” media. On the other hand, the decision to represent the Web with just this single selection, while clearly an editorial statement, has the effect of rendering its early netscape as more homogeneous than it ever really was - and certainly more homogenous than it is today, as HTTP splinters into an array of competing database and document technologies, many of them metastasizing from the staid desktop browser to a riot of handheld and household devices. The editors thus set the stage for a companion volume, for while the Web is self-documenting to an extent (owing to such heroic efforts as Brewster Kale’s Internet Archive, which periodically downloads a snapshot of the Web’s many terabytes of information to disk), there are already entire generations of experimental software, design practices, business models, fads, curiosities, rarities, and gems that have been lost to us.</p>
<p>Reviews can encourage reservations, but let me be unequivocal in closing: with <span class="booktitle">The New Media Reader</span> and its accompanying CD-ROM, Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort (and the MIT Press) have created a package that will serve the field for a long time to come. Certainly some readers will find themselves imagining ways of doing the book differently, but I doubt many will find much license for imagining ways of doing it better. I would be particularly remiss if I did not mention the generous and unfailingly authoritative introductions which accompany each piece, a substantial paratextual body of work in which the editors display a gift for synthesizing the disparate materials they have brought together. (Nor are they without humor: the note that accompanies Raymond Queneau’s <span class="booktitle">Cent mille milliards de poèmes</span> instructs those readers “too timid to operate upon their books” to photocopy the pages and cut the copies into strips.) Used as directed, <span class="booktitle">The New Media Reader</span> will launch new art, new software, new theory, and new thought.</p>
<p><span class="lightEmphasis">Click <a href="/electropoetics/quilted" class="internal">here</a> for another take on <span class="booktitle">The New Media Reader</span> - eds.</span></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/new-media">new media</a>, <a href="/tags/noah-wardrip-fruin">Noah Wardrip-Fruin</a>, <a href="/tags/nick-montfort">Nick Montfort</a>, <a href="/tags/borges">Borges</a>, <a href="/tags/oulipo">oulipo</a>, <a href="/tags/tim-berners-lee">Tim Berners-Lee</a>, <a href="/tags/stuart-moulthrop">Stuart Moulthrop</a>, <a href="/tags/babbage">Babbage</a>, <a href="/tags/donna-haraway">donna haraway</a>, <a href="/tags/roy-ascott">Roy Ascott</a>, <a href="/tags/ivan-sutherland">Ivan Sutherland</a>, <a href="/tags/richard-stallman">Richard Stallman</a>, <a href="/tags/william-gibson">William Gibson</a>, <a href="/tags/cybernetics">cybernetics</a>, <a href="/tags/united-states">united states</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator840 at http://electronicbookreview.comhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/open-source#commentsAlire: A Relentless Literary Investigationhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/wuc/parisian
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Philippe Bootz</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1999-03-15</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>1999 will mark the 10th anniversary of the web-based literary journal <span class="booktitle">Alire</span>. The journal - created in January 1989 by the Parisian group <a href="http://www.sitec.fr/users/akenatondocks/soft.htm" class="outbound">L.A.I.R.E.</a> (Lecture, Art, Innovation, Recherche, Écriture), which included Philippe Bootz, Frédéric Develay, Jean-Marie Dutey, Claude Maillard, and Tibor Papp - is known as the oldest multimedia journal in Europe, and certainly one of the oldest in the West. Before the arrival of CD-ROMs, before the Internet explosion, the journal was already publishing poetry written for and intended to be read through computers. The tenth anniversary will be an occasion to return to several of the pathways located at the heart of the journal, and this project will be realized by publishing a critical edition of our back issues alongside <span class="booktitle">Alire</span> 11 on CD-ROM. But here, one could offer an initial statement about the past ten years, a statement which will complete an earlier French article published in 1994 as “Poésies et machinations” (<span class="booktitle">Revue Larousse</span> #96), and which was reprinted in English as “Poetic Machinations” (<span class="booktitle">Visible Language 30:2</span>, 1996). Though the journal has always been a site for perfectly out-of-the-ordinary, independent creation circulated instantly everywhere, one could nonetheless single out the following characteristics of the <span class="booktitle">Alire</span> enterprise.</p>
<p>Historically, the journal corresponds to the establishment of a “third stream” in computerized literature, if one acknowledges that hypertext and earlier software texts (<span class="foreignWord">générateurs automatiques</span>) made up the first two. This third stream being that of animated literature, to which the five authors from L.A.I.R.E. came from backgrounds in aural and visual poetry. <a href="/thread/ele" class="thread">thREAD to the electropoetics issue</a> The three developments in computerized literature were in fact close contemporaries, the first works in these genres having been written “underground” between 1978 and 1985. One could say several things about these forms, the first being that none of them were inventions of computerized literature in the first place: one finds the kernels of the three new literary genres in forms such as books or videotapes (in the case of animated literature) or visual poetry settings. But it’s the sudden arrival of microcomputers on the scene that enables one to exploit virtual texts and prepare them for circulation. As the reader will soon see, computerization not only encouraged the creation and wide publication of these works, it profoundly modified its own capacity to perform. Is this to say, however, that there isn’t any other “computerized literature,” that the computer can only act as an amplifier and multiplier of possibilities? Those of us at L.A.I.R.E. simply think that the “digital” version of literature isn’t limited to a particular literary form, nor should it be given the upper hand in conceptualizing the work. The idea is that digitality encroached upon literature, not in order to kill it, but to transform it.</p>
<p>But first, to introduce animated literature, which makes up the distinctive hallmark of <span class="booktitle">Alire</span>. This recent genre brings about a temporal irruption within “the written object” and brings “multimedia” literature closer to the contemporary arts. This irruption in temporality from within writing introduces characteristics of oral literature to a resolutely non-oral object. To borrow a term from Robert Escarpit, it transforms the written text from being a document to a semi-document (like a film). What’s more, it imposes the irruption of an <span class="lightEmphasis">act</span> within the space of linguistic signs, imposing a poetic function for action on the poetic function of language. Borrowing from Jakobson’s famous formula, one could say that animated literature plots the constructed axis of sequential reading onto the plane of equivalence in written representation. Therein lies a complete poetic universe which offers us a rich, nonlinear glimpse of the text as it changes from the performance of an author by way of an intermediating machine (a conception of the text found in Castellin, for example), to a semantic textual animation which deconstructs the popular notion of writing as a continuous “transformative state of information in perpetual becoming” (Bootz and Papp, for example), to a displacement of words which establishes a supplementary polysemy by playing with synchronies, discrepancies, and collisions between various multimedia levels (Augusto de Campos and Dos Santos, for example). The recent intrusion of animation into the arts is likely to instigate an era as fecund as that of Gutenberg. The area to explore is extremely rich and a researcher will find it easy to remain there. From such conditions, <span class="booktitle">Alire</span> will emerge as a journal of “multimedia writing,” defining in this way a new space for something like a metapoetic constraint literature, since it uses reading from within as its constraint. But this is nothing new; <span class="booktitle">Alire</span> defines itself as the journal of “writing from the electronic source,” examining the content of its expression, or, more precisely, examining its expression through its contents.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Alire</span> has, for the first time in France, proclaimed loud and clear that computerized literature is literary and not a linguistic tool, as suggested by the programming and software camps who dominate Europe at this time. The first task for <span class="booktitle">Alire</span> was to affirm that literature was not “assisted by” the computer, contrary to the ideas of A.L.A.M.O. (Atelier [ <span class="lightEmphasis">workshop</span> ] de Littérature Assistée par la Mathématique et les Ordinateurs), but that there exists a literature tied intimately to computer technology. This is why the journal was initially designed to foster a complementarity between printed and digital media (through floppy disks, then through CD-ROM). In each of its first ten issues, everything that had been published in print came in chapbooks accompanying the disks, containing static illustrations and theoretical articles. Soon, the journal radicalized itself and the illustrations disappeared, leaving only the theory articles. Until now, even with software texts, no print publication existed which could also deliver programs or edited hypertexts to the public. By 1995, however, the growing popularity of multimedia technology and a greater public understanding of this kind of literature made it pointless to develop a stand-alone means of publishing computerized work. Hence, the reason for the two CD-ROMs we’ve published most recently: <span class="booktitle">The Electronic Reading Room [Le Salon de Lecture Electronique]</span> (which compiled the first nine issues in their order of publication) and the CD-ROM of <span class="booktitle">Alire</span> 10 (co-produced with the journal <span class="booktitle">DOC(K)S)</span>.</p>
<p>In the case of hypertexts and software programs, the approach <span class="booktitle">Alire</span> supports inverts classical conceptions. Traditional thinking always conceives of the text as an object. More precisely, it thinks of the text as an object accessible to reading - what we would call a “finished text” [ <span class="foreignWord">un “texte-à-voir</span> “]. Such a text is created by way of a particular reading practice performed by someone reading a hypertext or any text in general. This classical notion prevailed in Europe throughout the 80’s - a time when the software text established itself as the dominant meeting ground between the two following perspectives on textuality: simulation and conversion. Out of the algebraic style established by transformational grammar, programming constituted a tool drawn from the study and simulation of language, a possible means for automated translation. This perspective, which appeared brilliantly at the 1985 Cerisy conference (the proceedings of which were published in 1991 by the Presses Universitaires de Vincennes as <span class="booktitle">L’imagination informatique de la littérature</span>), considered the program itself as an extension of the author.</p>
<p>The second, more literary perspective retained neither the algebraic structure nor the combinatory approach; rather, it turned software texts into an extension of the strong Oulipo movement in France. This was the thrust of A.L.A.M.O.’s approach. Here, the machine is perceived as a textual automaton, a simulation of combinatorial paroxysms that sends the notion of constraint-literature into the realm of wizardry and nonsense, transforming the act of writing texts (an act understood as the instant of literature’s creation) into an endless series of Pavlovian reflexes. The most significant example of this tendency is the CNAC Georges Pompidou’s decision to produce electronic versions of all their catalogues and other publications since the exhibition “Les Immatériaux” in 1985. The CNAC has only produced copies and has destroyed the process for making originals. This catastrophic project poses some rather embarrassing questions surrounding the traditional conception of “text” conceived as a “finished text” (in this case, copies), and more generally, questions the idea of literature as a production of objects: these are the same questions regarding authors and texts which were set aside along with the role of reading.</p>
<p>It is interesting to note how “classic” authors responded to questions raised by this catastrophe. In general, they were against the possibility of a new genre of literature, arguing that the actual state of computer-generated literature showed a marked literary inferiority, if not an outright artistic poverty, in comparison to the real creation of a real author. One will find a full - if not overly caricatured - discussion of the issue by various “texte généré” authors and readers in <span class="booktitle">Action Poétique</span>, issue 129/130 (Avon, 1992). The claim that texte généré is “weak” writing seems to me to be as fallacious as the argument that a machine could never play a game of chess. One could reasonably estimate that several million dollars in development funding will push the limits between simulation and genius to far reaches discernible only by genius itself.</p>
<p>But in light of this dilemma, which replays the early psychodramas surrounding cybernetics, <a href="haylesce" class="internal">thREAD to Katherine Hayles’s narrative history of cybernetics</a> <span class="booktitle">Alire</span> took the part of cutting into the Gordian knot, redirecting the question into more humanistic streams. The entire debate rests on the existence, and, what’s more, on the longevity of texte généré. This supposition only works if there exists an object - which we’ll call “text” - that has the characteristics of writing and remains accessible to the manner of reading applicable to written documents. Furthermore, it is pledged to a notion of literature as a producer of objects (or of linguistic or semiotic structures independent of their mode of production) called “texts.” In passing, we note that this idea also prevailed in the classical understanding of hypertext, where the “text” is nothing other than the object accessible to the reader (the “finished text” in our wording). It is curious to note that the version of computerized literature we seek to counter, which I’ve described as the first generation, carries out an apparent inversion of the chronologies between writing and reading. It seems that the text does not preexist its reading, and yet that which characterizes a writing is that which is “destined” for reading, its effective reading is an operation independent of its existence and consecutive with itself. The suppression of this condition, from the immanence of creating the textual object (I am not speaking of reproduction as in a video) to its realized reading on the screen, simultaneously eliminates both the notion of literature founded on the predominance of linguistic or semiotic structures and the independent identity which the text assumes in order to free itself from the act of reading. The latter point, which <span class="booktitle">Alire</span> tries to assert, corresponds to the second generation version of computerized literature, the one which appears to prevail today in Europe. One could consider it as a mise-en-conformity, something like a rewrite, in the Chomskian sense of the term, of the printed version of a text généré: this version annuls the particular function of a software-text maker and positions the text généré like a conventional text, reducing the finished text to the status of an object. And yet <span class="booktitle">Alire</span> fights vigorously against such finished text objects or closed, functional “histories.” In so doing, the journal defines literature as a computer-based process and not as a creation or result. This immanence resembles the immanence integral to an animated text or video between the moments of its construction and its reading: one that sets itself up while creating several confusions (which we will speak of below), but does so without confusing the rendering and the reading. Highlighting the importance of function without necessarilly confusing the acts of rendering and reading, <span class="booktitle">Alire</span> treats software texts, hypertext, and animated literature as equivalents, all of them being forms or simply possible declinations of literature conceived of as a process, and certainly not the only possibilities - as evidenced by the emergence of new forms like the single-reading poem and the Locked Work (<span class="foreignWord">l’Oeuvre Verrouillée</span>).</p>
<p>Otherwise, from a pragmatic point of view, this equivalence is largely manifested at the level of programming: one only has to use a sophisticated and rather specialized language like C++, Toolbook, or Hypercard, and one very quickly eliminates the borders around these genres (the single-reading poem, developed in <span class="booktitle">Alire</span> 10, is a striking example: it’s only a matter of a program developing a hypertextual pathway in the shape of an animation). The most visible sign of this profound unity, which in my opinion establishes the true identity of a computerized literature, can be found in the fact that all of the realizations of this process, as published in <span class="booktitle">Alire</span>, situate themselves within the space of the screen and the duration of one reading. Other particularities, less noticeable, demonstrate the new aspects of this identity. These particularities are relative to two independent characteristics which I call “inferred givens” (” <span class="foreignWord">les données induites</span> “) and “the context-of-reading” (” <span class="foreignWord">le contexte-de-lecture</span> “).</p>
<p>Inferred givens correspond to the collection of materials created during the act of reading but not destined to be read by the reader. The nature and role of this material could take very diverse forms which I won’t expound upon here. They are always tied to an interactivity, even if such interactivity is minimal. The first interactivity, which could operate as such, is simply the launching of the textual process; the selection of the text’s “on/off” switch. Many works (one could cite as an example the work of Dutey and Jane Sautière in <span class="booktitle">Alire</span> 10 and <span class="booktitle">Prolix</span> by Christophe Petchanatz in <span class="booktitle">Alire</span> 6) utilize this basic interactivity in which the first function - before all the artistry - is to best situate the procedural behavior (the how-to) of this literature. In functioning, the textual process creates data which will, of course, be utilized by the process itself in order to manage that which will be read subsequently (sometimes even irrevocably), but this data itself is not destined for reading. It doesn’t become part of the finished text. This is certainly the first time in literature a part of the work is not destined to be read. In my opinion, it’s an important indication (though not exclusively literary) of the displacement of the notion of a work. We’ve touched on the emergence of this type of literature only being possible if a system for publication and distribution exists which enables access to the work and sufficiently allows for a “private” reading. This is not the least of <span class="booktitle">Alire’s</span> merits - favoring the emergence of a computerized literature anchored in the traditional intimacy of literature and avoiding the public space of the gallery or exposition. The arguments we’ve developed in this paragraph and the one following are only to be understood if one takes into account the particularity of this private reading which authorizes rereading and emphasizes the diachronic function of the work. The particularities of computerized literature - with regard only to other forms of literature, mechanized or not - appear (not manifesting themselves but simply being discernible) only in this diachronic dimension. As we will see below, in the most radical conception of computerized literature, the “functional point of view” (the notion that even the work cannot be thought of as independent from the scene of reading), the work creates its particular reading condition like/as the real situation of reading diverts the work; reading is not an operation “applied onto” a text. The inferred givens are without a doubt the least contestable proof of the existence of a true computerized literature.</p>
<p>The context-of-reading is a more controversial proof which, perhaps, does the most to show what is at stake. Appropriately, its importance to animated texts is <span class="lightEmphasis">apparent</span>. It’s also the contemporary subject that, in my opinion, causes the greatest confusion. The context-of-reading corresponds, from a technical point of view, to the difference that external constraints (uncommon and even more often unknown) enact upon the machines of creating and reading. There are two opposing views on the method of taking account of these constraints; the debate between Tibor Papp and myself presented in the booklet accompanying <span class="booktitle">Alire</span> 3 in 1994 stages it perfectly. The first, oldest approach which Papp defends denies the existence and significance of context-of-reading, casting it aside like a noise disrupting the author’s work. This point of view rejoins in fact the conception of the text as an object, an object perfectly mastered by its author and placing the animated finished text <span class="lightEmphasis">within</span> the tradition of visual and aural poetry. Such a view considers this object like the seat of a process (either animated or interactive) and takes into account “the rest” of the data constituted by interactivity and chance (by way of video). Literature, in this case, is procedural only “in part” - more specifically, the literary work is conceived of as an “object of procedural reading,” which is to say that reading can only be realized without realizing itself to be simultaneously a process within the text. This view is no more tied to computers than those conventional conceptions of hypertext and the software text. This type of literature, which relies on there being a process <span class="lightEmphasis">within</span> a textual object, is possible without the use of a computer, even without the use of another kind of machine. It is in this way that a friend, in the ‘80’s, realized a book-object which contained photosensitive paper, so much so that the text modified itself irreversibly over the course of a reading. In this sense, computers preserve the same qualities as more celebrated hypertexts and software programs: they facilitate the handling and multiplication of their own possibilities, and raise to the rank of literary technique that which, before, was only an effect. Computers play the role of a calculator.</p>
<p>I call this point of view “mimetic” because it supposes that, following the example of a “good” medium, the machine only creates data and faithfully reproduces the process which the author envisioned at the time of programming; the result which the reader accesses on his reading screen comes to be identical to the one realized by the author through his computer (the author’s textual process “mimics” the textual process realized by the author’s machine). This point of view doesn’t accord any particular literary or artistic value to the execution of the program at the time of reading. And yet this conception is only viable if the program’s execution strictly corresponds to the author’s decoding of the program, and more so, to the characteristics which were themselves realized at the moment of the program’s creation. In other words, the process of communication which establishes itself between the author and the reader comes to inscribe itself within a strict paradigmatic frame, following the example of artistic processes used in other media (notably the book, video, film, and audio CD). Unfortunately, the computer is too complex a machine for this unwieldy project. Numerous actors have sought to intervene in what happens at the moment of reading - in the unfolding of the textual process at the moment of reading - just as at the time of writing the program, the author (being in that case a particular reader) assumes the role of an author in order to validate his work, his writing. These actors are the author, by way of the intermediary program he has written, the program’s developer, the processor’s manufacturer, the operating system’s inventor, and also the reader by way of the total material configuration of the machine (and the software application used for reading) acting as an intermediator. In all of these intervenors, who don’t communicate between themselves, there’s too much unsaid (<span class="foreignWord">non dit</span>) in the hopes that a programmed work will, at the moment of reading, mimic or actualize the original process, right down to the letter. In this way, the program contains a large default capacity, with parameters defined by people other than the author. Is this to say that the “mimetic” point of view is utopian? One could say it comes close. The program developer notably, for a large sum of money, could favor this approach, at the cost of scaling back the number of possible ways it could operate. In effect, most of the differences experienced in the process created by the author and the reader’s encounter of it could be understood as problems of information flow. From this angle, one should take precautions to write a code performing for the flow demanded by the particular program which would be compatible with the one that is possible on the host machine at the time of reading. This is often done at a loss to graphic quality in the display or in sound quality - the very techniques which define a video piece (its flow being expressed in the number of images per second). This approach is imperfect, and often needs a programming architecture specific to the reader, though the risks of “incompatibility” are not excluded, contrary to a more tangible medium like video. Certain applications, like Macromedia Director, enter into this logic and seem to give very satisfying results. But this approach isn’t the only possibility. It is even bound to fail in the case of programmed literature, as we realized when the time came to reprogram the entirety of issues 1-6 of <span class="booktitle">Alire</span> in 1994.</p>
<p>Another point of view is quite pertinent here: the “functional” point of view which takes into account the functioning of the program at the time of its execution, even raising it, here as well under an ideal asymptotic form, to the rank of a predominant literary technique. It is not the process of the finished text which creates the work’s literariness; rather, it is the managing of the program’s execution. One quickly learns not to treat the context-of-reading merely as background noise, since no programming guru is able to guarantee a general and effective encoding for every type of product. This is the stuff of public expositions: when the author wants a particular result in exposition, he must bring the machine, he must reprogram one part of the work on the host machine, he must content himself with what he sees. In every case, a public presentation without a prior test is made “at the risk and peril of the organizer.” The functional point of view stipulates that the reader will read the real functioning of the program on the machine, and not a “desired” or “hoped for” functioning by a third person. Clearly the functional point of view established the principle forbidding failed attempts at reading: “all that could be read is read.” It also frees the author to rely on a technician who “will understand it” and “will be able to program it for you so that it works.” In other words, it announces the existence of a creative act in the present, especially at the levels of conception and of reading, possibly following the example of every free act. One realizes in <span class="booktitle">Alire</span> that this position has profound consequences on the writing and work of the author. In the first case, the journal favors the readability of the finished text at the eventual detriment of the project remaining faithful to the author’s vision. In the same constraint, the work of an author is no longer a creation, but rather the management of his project’s fragments: writing isn’t produced, but generates the machine’s incapacity to produce.</p>
<p>Must the writer then become a frustrated pessimist? No. Must the writer become handicapped? Alienated within his creativity by an opaque cretin of a machine? No. This position presents the advantage of positing a diachronic function for the work “which will arrive” (or very nearly) and this simple possibility is a victory for creativity. Without creativity, every programmed work, capable of evading the ideological limits of specific program developers, will only be a performance of the machine, a duration of life more restricted than the human life keeping count of the speed of the evolution of computers. It imposes a reflection more than sacrifices. First, as one has seen, some tools permit and maintain what the author hopes for in a setting satisfactory to a mimetic point of view. And the democratization of these tools certainly explains the important increase in computerized-literature authors. It follows that the functional point of view implies that every act of creation mixes itself up with an act of translation and of museum-like conservation. The author is obliged to know exactly what he wants to save in his project, to hierarchize the desired characteristics in the finished text, to think finally the textual process within the whole and not simply within the detail. One could even envisage, from this point of view, the creation of textual processes which “are realizable on no machine and yet readable on all of them,” which is to say: create a process that produces readable finished texts on all machines, even if not one of them contains all of the characteristics wanted in the complete project. One could even conceive of projects producing finished texts possessing an infinity of characteristics that bring programs of programs into being. This is an extremely ambitious project, but possible because the functional point of view doesn’t tackle literature in terms of a limited flow of information, but in terms of the subjection of a textual structure to flow and adaptation. The treatment of flow is not managed at the source (the writing), but reported at the destination and ruled at the time of reading. These are the stakes of “adaptive programming,” and only the future can tell us if it realizes this ideal. For now, we simply notice that the introduction of various “adaptive” rules permits the execution of modern animation programs on the 8086 in all modern PC’s, or permits one to play a work programmed on a fast machine, like “les Stances à Hélène” (in <span class="booktitle">Alire</span> 11), on slower machines (Macintoshes equipped with a PC emulator). In each case the finished text realized on a slow machine differs from one realized on a fast machine (actually, it differs from one machine to another), and this difference is linked to the differences of constraints which appear on the machines, not through some other interactivity. It is clear that for this type of work the structures which manage and execute programs, as emphasized by the author, are of tremendous importance to the forms of finished texts. I would now affirm that they are a part of the author’s style, and could perhaps even be articulated in literary forms, forms inaccessible to reading since only the result of the process that uses them would be accessible to the reader. In this literature of textual objects, the finished text (but also the program) loses its prominent position. It is the collection of processes of writing-generation-reading which constitutes the work and must be thought of as such by the author. A reading today does not guarantee to the reader the reproducibility of the viewed-text tomorrow, even if the text in question is not interactive, of the sort which “no one could affirm with certitude having read the work.” It is perhaps the social reader, resulting from indirect communications and discourses between individual readers of the work, who will guarantee the objectivity of reading in the diachronic evolution of statistical characteristics of these finished texts. This question remains open.</p>
<p>In conclusion, an idea of literature not exclusively destined for reading preserves an intimacy between author and reader even within the work. Although still in the developmental stages, this literature is neither of the order of performance, nor of the order of the trace; it realizes a modification within a permanence, instituting the immaterial and determined particularity as the only object accessible to reading, and returns us to the idea of the work inherited from the 19th century: not as a permanent entity, but as an entity knowable because these are no longer the permanent characters of the work which remain accessible to the reading. The work is a sphere of influence ordained by a creative act of the author. Eliminate the sphere of influence, and order disappears with it.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/virtual">virtual</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/internet">internet</a>, <a href="/tags/laire">laire</a>, <a href="/tags/art">art</a>, <a href="/tags/papp">papp</a>, <a href="/tags/dos-santos">dos santos</a>, <a href="/tags/de-campos">de campos</a>, <a href="/tags/alamo">alamo</a>, <a href="/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="/tags/alire">alire</a>, <a href="/tags/visual-poetry">visual poetry</a>, <a href="/tags/animated">animated</a>, <a href="/tags/animation">animation</a>, <a href="/tags/robert-escarpit">robert escarpit</a>, <a href="/tags/tool">tool</a>, <a href="/tags/tools">tools</a>, <a href="/tags/programming">programming</a>, <a href="/tags/alamo-0">A.L.A.M.O.</a>, <a href="/tags/oulipo">oulipo</a>, <a href="/tags/phillipe-bootz">phillipe bootz</a>, <a href="/tags/deconstruction">deconstruction</a>, <a href="/tags/trace">trace</a>, <a href="/tags/perman">perman</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator738 at http://electronicbookreview.comhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/wuc/parisian#commentsThe Revolution of an Anachronism: Radical Hypertextualism in a Text by Renaud Camushttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/internetnation/hypertext
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Jan Baetens</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1998-12-30</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="longQuotation">The following essay, first published in the fall of 1997, continues a thREAD introduced by <a href="/criticalecologies/(electro)writing" class="internal">Paul Harris</a> (ebr4) and <a href="/electropoetics/ethno-linguist" class="internal">Harry Mathews</a> (ebr5), on constraint-based narratives - editors</p>
<p>In the aftermath of May ‘68 and its cry to devolve all power to the imagination, the left wing theoretician of the French New Novel, Jean Ricardou, opened one of his famous microscopic readings of Claude Simon by saying bluntly: “If everything is permitted, nothing is possible.” <cite id="note_a">^1. Pour une théorie du nouveau roman, Paris, Seuil, coll. Tel Quel, 1971, p. 118. The original quote goes: “Si tout est permis, rien n’est possible.”).</cite> It is useful to remember this warning - the meaning of which is of course both literary and political, even when at first sight it is only intended to introduce some notes on the meaning of constraints in literature - when going through the explosive body of essays, manifestoes, polemics, statements, theories, nonsense, etc., on the rise of hypertext and, thus, the fall of text. One should always be very cautious when put in front of a new medium that promises to its followers freedom and happiness, with the sky being the usual limit of the virtual brave new world we are entering. In the same way that the first critics of the electronic universe were wrong when they saw in the computer the privileged tool of complete social control by a mysterious, hidden elite, the contemporary prophets of the hypertext are probably making a similar mistake by stressing only the positive virtues of the web and its liberating impact on reading and writing.</p>
<p>In the following pages (or, preferably, screens, because it is you, virtual reader, whom I would like to convince), I shall bring together some arguments on the necessity of a rule-governed electronic writing, i.e. on the necessity of maintaining or creating a set of strong constraints (those “formal techniques or programs whose application is able to produce a sense of its making text by itself” <cite id="note_b">^2. see Jan Baetens, <span class="booktitle">“Free Writing, Constrained Writing: The Ideology of Form”, Poetics Today,</span> vol. 18, number 1, Spring 1997, p. 1.</cite> ), even in electronic writing largely determined by the ideology of free and uninhibited creation.</p>
<p>In so doing, my aim is not to confront text and hypertext, as such a position would be absurd; neither text nor hypertext can by hypostasized as coherent bodies or structures. The first point I would like to make is that text cannot be opposed to hypertext in a dichotic way: the features generally attributed to hypertext (such as freedom, escape from linearity, deconstruction of the subject, infinity of meaning, and reading processes, radical decentering) are not only present in some types of textual writing (especially in the most constrained ones), but they are even more fruitfully developed in text than in hypertextual forms. My second point, then, is that hypertext should learn from those constrained forms of text, and learn more specifically from those characteristics of constrained texts which seem to restrain the freedom promised by the unlimited possibilities nowadays already given and produced by hypertext.</p>
<p>In order to make the discussion as concrete and as straightforward as possible, I shall avoid direct polemics against hypertextual structures (or lack of them) and focus my arguments on one single book, which certainly appears incredibly anachronistic but which at the same time 1) does everything and even more than hypertext has ever dreamt of, and 2) manages to do so by using precisely those features of the text hypertext would if possible like to condemn to oblivion.</p>
<p>But first some words on the book and the author (since there is a ‘book,’ heavy, uneasy to handle, and an ‘author,’ omnipresent, uneasily talking about himself). Renaud Camus’s <span class="booktitle">P.A./Petite annonce</span> <cite id="note_c">^3. Paris, éd. P.O.L (with whom Camus has published almost all of his other books as well). The title of the book refers to the small “contact announcements” in the specialized press.</cite> is the latest book of a French author who is known in the U.S. as the author of <span class="booktitle">Tricks</span> <cite id="note_d">^4. English translation by Richard Howard, New York, Saint Martin’s Press, 1981 (First French edition: 1979).</cite> and the spokesman of the gay community in France, a definition Camus himself feels very uncomfortable with. To Bruno Vercier’s question in a recent special issue of <span class="booktitle">Yale French Studies</span> on gay and lesbian writing: “Do you consider yourself a homosexual writer?”, he answers that he “would find it annoying and limiting to be locked into the image of a homosexual writer” <cite id="note_e">^5. Bruno Vercier, <span class="booktitle">“An Interview with Renaud Camus”</span>, in YFS, number 90 (“Same Sex, Different Text”), 1996, p. 20.</cite> , given the fact that this is only one aspect of his personality and writing.</p>
<p>Although P.A. is sexually explicit, the book is rather part of a totally different domain of Camus’ writing, which explores a dizzying variety of genres and discourses. <span class="booktitle">P.A.</span> continues an all-embracing work in progress initiated by four books of “eclogues” during the years 1975-1982, the most “visible” feature of these books being their combination of different texts, fragments, and styles; they are combined first in a classic linear way, then in a spectacular, non-linear way, the pages of the book being subdivided into strokes of continuously shifting format and aspect, but linked together by the play of internal references. Each new stroke is to be read as the footnote attached to a preceding fragment, but very soon things become very complicated, with different footnotes (up to the thirteenth or fourteenth degree!) spreading over dozens of pages in a kaleidoscopic structure that completely destroys, to the despair of the reader, any classic interaction between text and footnote.</p>
<p>Around 1980, these “eclogues” could reasonably be considered prophetic texts since they prefigured the possibilities of what today is labeled hypertext. In 1997, nevertheless, the publication of a work such as <span class="booktitle">P.A.</span> could not less reasonably be spurned as a pitiful anachronism, not only because Camus does not seem to do anything else than what he was already doing twenty years ago, but also because his once revolutionary style now seems pathetically out of date, and very poor in comparison with the innumerable tricks of modern hypertext.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, things are much more complicated. Indeed, when reading <span class="booktitle">P.A.</span> attentively, one can only observe that thanks to its maintaining the traditional framework of the book, Camus’ defiance of the typical linear structures and reading habits of the text are much more devastating than what could be realized by hypertext. How do we have to understand this paradox?</p>
<p>First of all, one should stress that in the case of a book such as <span class="booktitle">P.A.,</span> which proposes a large set of reading paths that can neither be followed simultaneously nor simply consecutively, the very limits of the host medium (the materiality of a 400-page volume) continually and painfully remind the reader of the contradiction between the text he is asked to read, and the very incomplete, partial, poor reading he is making of it. Since he can visually survey everything to be read without being able to read it all in a satisfactory way, the reader certainly loses control, but can never feel euphoric about it. He is not surfing on an infinite ocean of linked materials, choosing freely any new directions and new associations unforeseen by the author(s) of the text. Instead, he tragically knows that, however great his efforts to grasp the text, he shall always be missing something. In other words, he realizes that the problem of reading is not in the first place a matter of quantity but of quality: the problem with reading is not that there is always something else or something more to read, but that the things that are read are never read well enough. This is a crucial aspect of reading totally obliterated by most discussions on hypertext and by all those who consider the fading away of the borderlines of the reading process a promise of freedom and discovery.</p>
<p>In addition to this redefinition of the reading problem, there is a second great advantage of (constrained) textual structures in comparison with their hypertextual versions. As is well known, one of the main advantages of hypertext is the many possibilities of interactivity it provides to the reader. In the case of <span class="booktitle">P.A.,</span> a work that defenders of hypertext would blame as a ridiculously outmoded mode of pseudo-hypertextuality, cooperation between reader and writer seems to go along the lines of a one-way traffic: the reader has to follow the writer, even if the latter has done his best to bring in every possible booby trap one can think of. But once again, this very narrowly defined and fully constrained reader activity has nothing to envy in the paradise of full and playful interaction proposed by all types of hypertextual tools. Indeed, by painfully learning the difficult rules of the text, the reader acquires the ability to provide a response to the author’s challenge that is infinitely richer than the random navigation in the hypertextual labyrinths called interactivity. To put it another way: the discipline required of the reader’s response in the case of constrained text is less easy and gratifying than the quick and massive response to hypertext, but there is a good chance that it is the only way to real creativity. While constrained texts teach their readers how to become autonomous writers by themselves, most of the current hypertexts (I know I am exaggerating, but I am not only exaggerating…) tend to lock their readers into the logic of their own system, or they invite them to go elsewhere, always, however, in a rather haphazardous way (which is not the best guarantee for genuine creativity).</p>
<p>Borges once said something which is now becoming very difficult to understand in its full implications: if literature is infinite, it is not because the number of books is countless, but because every text, when well written, is infinite in itself. <cite id="note_f">^6. I apologize for not giving the precise references of this quote, which I believe is to be found in the <span class="booktitle">Entretiens</span> avec Georges Charbonnier. Borges being Borges, the center being also the periphery and vice versa, I wouldn’t however be astonished if the sentence is hidden somewhere else…</cite> The great lesson of <span class="booktitle">P.A.,</span> that curiously anachronistic opus in an age of electronic reproducibility, is that it teaches us what the hype of hypertextuality is making us miss: the necessity of the quality of reading and writing, the discipline it implies, but also the liberation and freedom it provides to anybody who is willing to work, not to consume, to understand rather than to go with the flow.</p>
<p>Of course, any further conclusion would be impertinent. But the issues I have tried to raise cannot be reduced to the discussion of one single book by one single author. Behind these issues, there are many other questions, both political and literary. From a literary point of view, it would be interesting to reflect more seriously upon the ethics of the writing programs induced by hypertext, with its fascination for all types of combinatory literature. Combinatory texts are not new (starting from Antiquity to Raymond Queneau and the Oulipo-authors, there has even been a never-ending production), <cite id="note_g">^7.See for instance, among other works, <span class="booktitle">Einzelheiten</span>, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1962.</cite> but with the new possibilities of hypertext, it seems as if qualitative discussions have been wiped out by the sometimes infantile pleasures of mass production. Unfortunately, it is not enough to produce all possible varieties of a writing logarithm to obtain a satisfying literary result.</p>
<p>From a more political point of view, it would be ever more interesting to investigate to what degree hypertext and democratization are linked or not (nowadays, it is uncritically assumed that hypertext automatically produces a more democratic functioning of writing and reading processes). Here, it is not completely useless to remember the very critical remarks an author such as Enzensberger made on the rapid spread of pocket books, which, mutatis mutandis, in the ’50s and ’60s meant a revolution of literary culture and habits not unlike the transformations which have resulted from putting literature on the web in the late ’90s, and which Enzensberger precisely called a pseudo-revolution, even a counterrevolution, since the pocket market only heightened the weight of classic authors and of industrial concerns.</p>
<p>There are of course many other questions. What counts now, is to start the debate.*</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">*I would like to thank my colleague Roger Janssens (K.U.Leuven) for his useful comments on the first draft of this article.</span></p>
<h2>footnotes:</h2>
<p>Paul Harris &gt;— <a href="/criticalecologies/(electro)writing" class="internal">critical ecologies winter 96/97</a></p>
<p>Harry Matthews &gt;— <a href="/electropoetics/ethno-linguist" class="internal">(electro)poetics spring 97</a></p>
<p>An afterword (and some afterthoughts) on <span class="booktitle">P.A.</span></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/oulipo">oulipo</a>, <a href="/tags/queneau">queneau</a>, <a href="/tags/enzensberger">enzensberger</a>, <a href="/tags/janssens">janssens</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/mathews">mathews</a>, <a href="/tags/harris">harris</a>, <a href="/tags/camus">camus</a>, <a href="/tags/jan-baetans">jan baetans</a>, <a href="/tags/constraint">constraint</a>, <a href="/tags/renaud-camus">renaud camus</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator708 at http://electronicbookreview.comhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/internetnation/hypertext#commentsThe Comedy of Scholarshiphttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/playfulness
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<div class="markup">by</div>
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<div class="field-item even">Katherine Weiss</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2007-10-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h2>I.</h2>
<p>When asked to write a review for <span class="booktitle">EBR</span>, I immediately scanned their extensive list of books for the word “Beckett;” Sam, after all, is my favorite author. For several years now I have been researching the Irish Nobel Prize winner. Vaguely remembering the title, but not sure whether I had read the book since the publication date was listed as 2005, I offered to write a piece on Hugh Kenner’s <span class="booktitle">Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians</span>. When the book arrived, I was surprised to discover that it was a much older book and that I had read it while undertaking an M.Phil. in Dublin nearly ten years ago. It feels strange to be writing a review on this previously published study, written more than forty years ago by the prominent literary scholar Hugh Kenner whose death in 2003 most likely prompted the republication of this short but rich book. Indeed, Dalkey Archive Press has also newly released a handsome paperback edition of Kenner’s 1968 book <span class="booktitle">The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy</span>. Despite the awkwardness of reviewing this republished book, <span class="booktitle">EBR</span>’s invitation has given me the opportunity to revisit this playful work of scholarship, which as a graduate student at Trinity College Dublin, I read rather too hastily as it did not serve the purpose of my thesis topic.</p>
<p>After sitting down to write my review, I wondered whether my critique would be of any value to readers of Beckett. After all, most Beckett scholars know the work of Hugh Kenner. However, it will, I hope, be helpful to a younger generation of scholars who perhaps have never read this “ancient” book from 1962. Many instructors, myself included, unwittingly discourage students from digging up older scholarship when requiring them to show their knowledge of current discussions on a given topic, yet Kenner’s study of Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett is refreshingly time-defying. It both offers a glance into the more experimental scholarship of 1960s France and as such provides an analysis that to this day seems original.<cite class="note" id="note_1"><span class="booktitle">Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature</span>, also published by Dalkey Archive Press, may shed light on Kenner’s analysis of stoicism in <span class="booktitle">Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett</span>. Oulipo, a group of French thinkers who came from fields as varied as mathematics, letters and the arts, joined together for the first time in September of 1960 to discuss the potential for literature. This group had two goals: “Analysis” which consisted of the revival of “older, even ancient (but not necessarily intentional) experiments in literary form” (1). Flaubert and Joyce provided the group with examples of such an experiment; their literary experiments provide “the potential layers of the novelistic onion” for Oulipo (72). The second goal, “synthesis,” involved the furthering of new forms which can be seen in <span class="booktitle">One Hundred Trillion Poems</span>, a project that exhausted every possible way in which the poetry of this collection could be combined and read (3-4) - a technique that may recall Beckett’s sucking stone episode in <span class="booktitle">Molloy</span>.</cite> Moreover, his style of prose captures the playfulness of the authors he investigates. Kenner is not a dry journalistic literary critic; instead, he allows the content of his argument to shape the style of his writing.</p>
<p>The first evidence of Kenner’s playfulness lies at the heart of the inclusion of Guy Davenport’s delightful illustrations. It is often the case in literary or historical studies that illustrations merely supplement the words of the texts; however, in this work the “illustrations are intended to keep the reader from dwelling on the paucity of documentation.” Kenner’s explanation in the “Author’s Note” hints at the central theme of the book - that of characters or narrators who dwell on facts, data, and language - and serves as a warning to the literary critic. Kenner asks that we leave the detective work behind and return to “play.”</p>
<p>Kenner begins his “Preface” by defining the “stoic” as “one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed” (xiii). While all novelists face the task of filling in the empty page, the stoic novelist is calmly aware that he/she is limited to the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and the rules of grammar. His/her creativity depends on the arrangement of the elements available.</p>
<p>Kenner continues to explain that critics of the early 20th century, such as I.A. Richards, have required readers to disregard their own stoicism. According to Kenner, Richards “found it necessary to labor the point that <span class="lightEmphasis">tone</span> (‘the attitude of the speaker to the audience’) [as] one of the components of meaning” (xiv). So much of modern writing, Kenner explains, has no voice, nor no attitude. Essential to this argument are the invention of the encyclopaedia in which men were employed to gather facts and arrange them alphabetically and the invention of the Gutenberg press in which men were employed to arrange and set ideas, sentences, and letters. Print technology “does not talk, it compresses” (xv). Modern readers, hence, cannot identify the voice because they simply hear none. Kenner explains that we need, instead, to focus on the interpretive possibilities within a closed set.</p>
<p>The history of print technology ends for Kenner with the novel. He claims that the novel fulfills two requirements: verisimilitude and plausibility. Kenner writes that verisimilitude “means that the book shall abound in words which name objects familiar to the reader, and in sentences describing pieces of behavior or imitating pieces of conversation which the reader finds recognizable” (xvii). Plausibility, Kenner goes on, “means that the progression of events which the work purports to chronicle shall at every point satisfy criteria of reason, since it is the reader’s belief that his own actions are reasonable, and he will employ his book-reading time on nothing else” (xvii). The novel must be constructed out of recognizable units and reasonable actions and events. While writers, such as Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, have been referred to by students and academics alike as “obscure” and “difficult,” Kenner shows us that even these writers’ seemingly implausible novels are rooted in the recognizable and conceivable. Concluding the “Preface,” Kenner asserts that within a closed field these writers produce a record of an intellectual journey. Their legacy is one of “courting a dead end but discovering how not to die” (xiv).</p>
<h2>II.</h2>
<p>Chapter One, “Gustave Flaubert: Comedian of the Enlightenment” opens with the problem of trying to locate the Enlightenment. Kenner claims that the Enlightenment lacks chronology, locality, and identity. The only “piece of baggage from those far off days” (1) that we continue to carry with us, according to Kenner, is a book written and read by no one - The Encyclopaedia. This most important, yet unreadable text, which attempts to organize knowledge, ironically is a work of fragmentation.</p>
<p>Yet, as Kenner points out, it is the encyclopaedic efforts of the Enlightenment that are the butt of Flaubert’s comedic novels. Flaubert, especially in <span class="booktitle">Bouvard et Pécuchet</span>, exposes the comedy of the attempt to discover truth and systematize this knowledge. To alphabetically arranged knowledge is an absurdity, it perpetuates discontinuity and characterizes the work as scientific. Scientific experiments, as Flaubert reveals with the comic encyclopaedic endeavors carried out by his copying clerks, work to prove the exception as true. Throughout this novel, Flaubert’s copying-clerk heroes, Bouvard and Pécuchet, take up idiotic scientific experiments and strive to catalogue their findings. The reader cannot help but laugh when, for example, Bouvard and Pécuchet fail to prove that muscular contraction creates heat, but, as Kenner states, what is more ridiculous is that if the bathwater in which Bouvard is submersed would rise, then their efforts “would not seem imbecilic at all” (24). Indeed, there is “nothing more absurd than the very conception of a <span class="lightEmphasis">fact</span>, an isolated datum of experience, something to find out, isolated from all the other things that there are to be found out” (24). Kenner goes on to show that before 1632, “fact was a thing done, <span class="lightEmphasis">factum</span>, part of a continuum of deed and gesture” (25). As such, the emphasis was not on what was discovered but rather how it was discovered.</p>
<p>Although Flaubert pokes fun at Bouvard and Pécuchet’s efforts to catalogue scientific knowledge, he himself indulged in creating his own comic encyclopedia. Yet rather than basing his work on scientific facts, Flaubert created a catalogue of clichés - a dictionary of repeated ideas. His <span class="booktitle">Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues</span>, which consumed his life for over three decades, is a handbook for novelists. Kenner tells us that clichés found in Flaubert’s handbook can be traced in <span class="booktitle">Madame Bovary</span>. Art, as Flaubert wrote to George Sand, “is meant to portray things as they always are, in themselves, in their general nature, disengaged from all ephemeral contingency” (19). Kenner explains that for Flaubert, “Art [tended] toward the general and human behavior [tended] toward the cliché” as such “the supreme artist is the cliché expert [who] cannot do better than to imitate, as closely as he can, the procedures of the hack” (19). In other words, Flaubert’s genius does not lie in the myth of originality. The very act of trying to write an original novel is an absurdity because novels are modeled on human behavior which clutches onto clichés.</p>
<p>The opening pages of <span class="booktitle">Bouvard et Pécuchet</span> reveal this artistic goal, itself, as farcical. Flaubert’s “mad precision of farce” (10) discloses the writer’s struggle to create “things as they always are” (19). What we imagine when reading the comic opening of how Bouvard and Pécuchet happened to meet on a park bench, and how they both are copying clerks who have their names written inside their hats, Kenner argues, is “a writer racking his brains for a plausible way to get the story started” (11). Although the writer fails to create a plausible meeting between the two men, Flaubert succeeds to convey the sheer difficulty in writing as well as the comedic pleasure in withholding a naturalistic or realistic encounter between two individuals. If literature is not about “real” emotions and dilemmas, as my high school English teachers tried to convince me, and it is not about escaping the “real” as my fellow students believed, then what is the purpose of literature? Kenner believes it is to draw attention to the author writing. In essence, the technology of the modern novel reflects the writer’s struggle to create and consequently reflects his process of creation.</p>
<p>Convincingly, Kenner argues that Flaubert’s novels depict the task of writing fiction as “endlessly <span class="lightEmphasis">arranging</span> things” (13). The skilled writer differs from Flaubert’s copying clerks in that he will use fiction itself to vanquish fiction; he will arrange, and maneuver, and contrive, to such bland effect that no one will ever afterward be quite sure where contrivance began and serendipity left off. He will use with cunning every device of the merely facile novelist; and the result will be such a compendium of unreality that it will seem real. (13)</p>
<h2>III.</h2>
<p>While Flaubert is the “comedian of the Enlightenment,” who instead of offering to enlighten his readers merely reveals the idiotic act of arranging things, James Joyce is the “Comedian of the Inventory.” In Chapter Two, Kenner argues that Joyce, like his fellow modernists, plays with words and sentence order. Although Joyce’s word-play is recognizably English, Joyce’s vocabulary and his word order within a sentence, nevertheless, “fall well outside of basic English” (30). To fully appreciate Joyce’s playful techniques such as placing “the adverbial phrase before the object,” “setting the verb between the subject and phrases in apposition to the subject,” and “placing the adverb where it will exert stress against the other members of the sentence” (31), Kenner asks us to imagine the difficulties of the foreign reader. The foreign reader will find no relief in a dictionary, a grammatical handbook, or in the spoken English of Ireland. Indeed, Joyce’s techniques do not reveal a voice speaking; they reveal a writer writing, arranging words, inventing with the fragments available to him.</p>
<p>Continuing to illustrate Joyce’s uniqueness, Kenner contrasts the Irish writer to Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad, arguing that both use the convention of the storyteller. Dickens’ novels are “scripts to be brought to life in oral delivery” (35) and Conrad’s are studies of a “spoken narrative discharged into a reflexive silence” (34). While Ulysses is Joyce’s Odyssey, it lacks all evidence of storytelling. Unlike the narrative of Dickens’ novels which require a storyteller, Conrad’s novels which feature narrators whose experiences cause them to reflect in silence, or Homer’s epic which is “organized in memory and unfolded in time,” Joyce’s novel has no speaker and unfolds on the printed page, a “<span class="lightEmphasis">technological space</span>” (35).</p>
<p>Crucial to Joyce is the reader’s ability to travel through the pages of the printed novel. Unlike Homer’s epic tale which required an audience of listeners, Joyce’s Ulysses, with the help of Gutenberg technology, makes it possible for a reader to follow an image or reference throughout the text. Kenner explains that this massive novel demands that its reader jump back as he/she reads the phrase “Potato preservative against plague and pestilence, pray for us” on page 488 and then recalls having read earlier on pages 372 and 56 “Poor mamma’s panacea” (32).</p>
<p>Kenner argues that Joyce is indebted to Jonathan Swift. Swift’s <span class="booktitle">A Tale of a Tub</span>, written roughly 200 years before <span class="booktitle">Finnegans Wake</span>, is “a parody of the book as a book” (37). <span class="booktitle">A Tale of a Tub</span> reveals Swift’s “fascinated disquiet” (39) of new print technology. Kenner’s analysis cleverly draws a connection between <span class="booktitle">Finnegans Wake</span> and Swift’s responses to Gutenberg technology as changing the writer’s style and intent. For Swift the purpose of writing was to “gain the confidence and understanding of another” (38); however, Swift reveals that with print technology verbal intercourse between individuals is disrupted.</p>
<p>Swift recognized that the voice of the storyteller is eliminated through Introductions, Prefaces, Apologies and Dedications, Headings, Subheadings, Tables, Footnotes, Indices, and Pictures (40) which are all made possible by Gutenberg technology. Focusing on Joyce’s devotion to the footnote in <span class="booktitle">Finnegans Wake</span> and paralleling it to Swift’s “Digressions” in <span class="booktitle">A Tale of a Tub</span>, Kenner explains that this “device for organizing units of discourse discontinuously in space rather than serially in time” (41) is made possible by the technological space of the page. It is here that Kenner’s playfulness reaches its full force. Throughout his discussion of the footnote, Kenner plants a series of footnotes to comically demonstrate that the footnote, like the other devises noted above, “defeat all efforts of the speaking voice” (39). Imbedded in his definition of the footnote, for example, is a footnote that reads, “In the middle of the previous paragraph. Please pay attention” (41), which pulls us back to the previous paragraph where we read</p>
<p class="longQuotation">… the man who composes a footnote, and sends it to the printer along with his text, has discovered among the devices of printed language something analogous with counterpoint: a way of speaking in two voices at once, or of ballasting or modifying or even bombarding with exceptions<sup>4</sup> his own discourse without interrupting it. (40)</p>
<p>Kenner is intentionally playing games with us - directing us to a passage that has another footnote, and this footnote too is a joke on literary scholars. It reads: “Some footnotes of course seem totally unrelated to the point in the text at which they are appended. They suggest an art form like the refrains in Yeats’ late poems” (40). It is, in fact, Kenner’s footnotes that, on the one hand, are unrelated to the point. “Please pay attention” tells us nothing about the passage. On the other hand, his seemingly irrelevant footnotes reveal the comedy of organizing information on the printed page.</p>
<p>The scholarly footnote, while breaking into the narrative voice, helps the reader to trace knowledge. Joyce, too, was aware of this use of the footnote. Kenner explains that much of <span class="booktitle">Ulysses</span> is about tracing facts and knowledge. Joyce, he tells us, was meticulous about including real factual data into <span class="booktitle">Ulysses</span>. The street names and businesses are accurately mapped out, one discovers when cross-referencing <span class="booktitle">Ulysses</span> with the 1904 <span class="booktitle">Thom’s Dublin Directory</span>.</p>
<p>Joyce’s enterprise, in effect, parallels the book with the city. Cities include zones, limits, and borders, like books which are limited by their geographic plane. Every list, every form of discourse has a limited set of possibilities (54). Joyce’s checklists, be it of street names, rivers, the epiphany, or styles of writing, are mechanically exhaustive inventories which are “comic precisely because [they are] exhaustive” (55). Whereas the encyclopaedic act contributed to Flaubert’s disapproval of humanity, it gave Joyce a way to re-imagine the city he fled.</p>
<p>It is tempting to read Joyce as an exile who scorned and ridiculed Dublin, yet Kenner reminds us that Joyce attempted to create a “finite list of words” (53) to show his Dublin as a place “he loved for its variety and distrusted for its poverty of resource” (66). The richness of his inventory reveals the richness of the city he left behind; however, an inventory is always made up of the already present. Joyce is not the heroic Irish inventor creating his own words and his own epic journey. His inventory is rooted in the Irish soil and its gutters. Dublin is, as Kenner puts it, “a kind of prison which [Joyce] neither escaped nor not escaped” (64).</p>
<h2>IV.</h2>
<p>Kenner does two things in the final chapter. He sums up his arguments about Flaubert and Joyce, and examines Beckett’s comedic impasse. Perhaps because so much of the third chapter, “Samuel Beckett: the Comedian of the Impasse,” is spent comparing Beckett to Flaubert and Joyce in a move to conclude, this is Kenner’s weakest chapter. Despite this pitfall, Kenner’s observations remain refreshingly astute and imaginative.</p>
<p>Kenner’s opening statement “Let us begin by assuming Samuel Beckett’s existence” (67) may at first seem ridiculous, yet the question of existence is at the very heart of Beckett’s work. In a Foucaultian move, Kenner convincingly argues:</p>
<p>Nothing confronts our senses but a set of printed words, assembled by we cannot say whom with we cannot tell what authority; and not only is the work of uncertain credit, but it can also entoil us in whatever doubts are felt, or allegedly felt, by the man who is writing, or says he is. (67)</p>
<p>Kenner’s claim that one way in order to prove Beckett’s existence would be to have manuscripts with his name of them is a rare moment that dates this study. Beckett is undoubtedly the author of these works, and his manuscripts, still unavailable at the time Kenner was writing his book, are now open to the public at the Beckett International Foundation housed at the University of Reading in England. Kenner’s point, however, is that writing is a solitary act, and because no one sees the author writing, the author resembles Godot who never appears on stage.</p>
<p>Aware of the solitary nature of writing, Beckett repeatedly throws into doubt the act of bearing witness and the reliability of witnesses. Beckett, as Kenner posits, does not provide the readers with painstaking explanations as to how the narrator has gained the information he is reporting. Rather, Beckett’s works continually draw attention to the fact that all is made up and that the author, too, is a creation. In <span class="booktitle">Molloy</span>, Moran concludes with “Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining” (69). Kenner likens Moran’s act to the Cretan liar who says that “all Cretans are liars” (69). Indeed, Beckett plays with the declarative statement rather than the inventory of words as his predecessor Joyce had done. Moran’s cyclical declarative statements point to the act of writing as creating lies. The novelist, like the Cretan liar, throws his texts into question.</p>
<p>Kenner argues that “Beckett’s first strategy is a strategy of survival” (75). To support this observation Kenner examines Beckett’s “Three Dialogues,” conversations between Samuel Beckett and the French painter Georges Duthuit which Beckett recorded into print. Beckettians today question whether these dialogues ever took place. The witness to the dialogues is nowhere to be found. Regardless, these conversations establish, according to Kenner, writing as “the perfect not-doing of what cannot be done” (76). While the gathering factual material transformed Joyce’s fiction into fact (78), for Beckett “the detached, encyclopaedic style more and more evidently rehearses not facts but possibilities, not evidences but speculations” (81). The detail given to Watt’s strange way of walking, for example, is not recorded by an average observer, but rather is a record of “sober curiosity, scientific observation, and minute recording” (80); the recording of Watt’s walking opens possibilities within a closed system. Kenner returns to Swift, this time to draw parallels between <span class="booktitle">Gulliver’s Travels</span> and Beckett’s own scientific observations. He shows:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">though Beckett more than two centuries after Swift strips down to a bare minimum the inventory of things, he observes with scrupulous care the empiricist definition of a work of fiction, that it is made up of a set of phenomena along with rules for dealing with them. These rules are derived from the mental processes of an observer who is part of the fiction (91).</p>
<p>This and the narrator’s ability to tell us everything but that which we count on, as apparent when Moran is unable to explain how he managed to kill a man despite his ability to tell us about the minute details of the mundane is, Kenner argues, how Beckett exploits incompetence.</p>
<p>Kenner explains that in the early novels such as <span class="booktitle">Murphy</span> Beckett still worked with an identifiable narrative structure. In his later works, Beckett left narrative conventions and grammar behind. Punctuation in <span class="booktitle">How it is</span> has virtually disappeared. Beckett’s world moves towards lessness, and writing seems to be more than just an act of incompetence. The works disintegrate before our eyes. What is surprising is that Kenner did not incorporate Beckett’s 1956 interview with Israel Shenker in which Beckett draws on Joyce to define his own writing. He told Shenker that Joyce was “tending towards omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I am working with impotence, ignorance” (Acheson, 1997, 6). Kenner’s decision to exclude this very crucial interview, however, may lie in his move to step away from author intentionality.</p>
<p>Beckett’s narrators record incompetence in order to end. Despite the reduction of language to mere phrases that lack punctuation or to singular images on stage, Beckett does not reach a dead-end. His “simple objects proliferate” (87). Out of the mud in <span class="booktitle">How it is</span> a story, even though it is a tale of trying to narrate a tale, is born. “Indeed Beckett has been the first writer,” according to Kenner, “to exploit directly the most general truth about the operations of a Stoic Comedian, that he selects elements from a closed set, and then arranges them inside a closed field” (92,94). Kenner explains that a “field” in Number Theory “contains a collection of elements, and a system for dealing with those elements” (96). In Beckett, each of his immobile characters “fondles the elements of a closed field, or scrutinizes the laws for dealing with them” (98). In <span class="booktitle">Happy Days</span>, Winnie, stuck in a mound up to her waist in the first act and then up to her neck in the second, is reduced to contemplating and arranging fragments of text she has memorized. She may be stuck repeating the same lines each day, but the arrangement of those wonderful lines are hers.</p>
<p>Concluding his journey, Kenner writes that the process has been one of “steady interiorization” (102). We have moved from the encyclopaedic investigations of Flaubert, to the inventory of facts and data of Joyce, and finally to Beckett who brings us to the near dissolution of the encyclopaedia. What Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett ultimately reveal is that literature can encounter one crisis after another “without losing the possibility of continuing an orderly development, and doing something utterly unforeseen tomorrow” (107).</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Acheson, James. <span class="booktitle">Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice: Criticism, Drama and Early Fiction.</span> Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997.</p>
<p>Motte, Warren, F., trans. and ed. <span class="booktitle">Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature</span>. Normal and London: Dalkey Archive P, 1998.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/poetics">poetics</a>, <a href="/tags/oulipo">oulipo</a>, <a href="/tags/constraint">constraint</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1222 at http://electronicbookreview.comLiterature from Page to Interface: The Treatments of Text in Christophe Bruno's Iteraturehttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/textualized
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Søren Pold</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2007-10-11</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h2>1. Ontological unrest</h2>
<p>In the late 1980s and early 1990s, digital hypertext literature was broadly considered a reckoning with the book. In continuation of a post-modern and post-structuralist tradition, hypertext was seen as an exhaustion of, and a potential break with, the literary forms of the printed book, a view that was reinforced by hypertext theory. Already before the general appearance of digital hypertext literature, there was a widespread theoretically based understanding of the crisis of the book, the late age of print, the end of the Gutenberg galaxy, and so on.</p>
<p>However, the book lives on, and neither the web nor the e-book seems to be able to kill it. Consequently, the many predictions of the book’s demise put forth by digital literary theorists ten to fifteen years ago seem overrated and hysterical today, and classical literary scholars have wiped the sweat off their foreheads. Nevertheless, I suggest taking the predictions seriously as a sign of a more profound ontological unrest in the field of literature and the very ontology of the text that is far from over, even though the book seems to be surviving. What is more, I believe this kind of unrest is vital for the continuing development and timeliness of literature as an art form. Even though the book does not appear to be dying anytime soon, changes are taking place in our literary culture that have major consequences for the role of writing and reading in our current digital media reality.</p>
<p>In a broad sense, books and literature have always been about literary culture and society: from the close connections between the printing press and national languages and cultures in the 16th century, to the articulation of freedom of speech and of the press during the Enlightenment, to relations between book production and assembly-line capitalism or the close connections between the author function and authority, as outlined by Barthes, among others (“The Death of the Author” ).</p>
<p>For ages, the privileged medium of literature has been the book, and the book has been of key importance for the organization of knowledge - indeed, for the very concept of knowledge, organization, and so forth . However, while books are not becoming insignificant or superfluous anytime soon, we still have a new dominant medium for the organization of knowledge, culture, and society. Digital literature consequently has a role to play as a form of media-art that makes us aware of what is happening to text as a material and concept, to reading and writing, and to the material basis of text in the ongoing process of digitization, networking, and mediation, and how these material and formal changes correspond to social and cultural changes. The concept of text is currently undergoing dramatic changes, and most text is now produced and read at the networked interface. Text in contemporary society has become increasingly kinetic, electrified, spatial, and more or less cybernetically controlled by, for instance, commercialization in our postmodern urban environment and on the web. As pointed out by Walter Benjamin, such a development has influenced printed literature already with Mallarmé and up through the historical avant-garde (e.g., Aragon and Dada). <cite class="note" id="note_1">Benjamin writes about this and Mallarmé already in <span class="booktitle">Einbahnstrasse</span>, and later he was inspired by Aragon when writing <span class="booktitle">Das Passagen Werk</span> ((Benjamin, Tiedemann and Schweppenhèauser 1980)).</cite></p>
<p>Contemporary poetry can also with advantage be discussed in connection with the formal, material, and technological developments of text. In a fairly recent article, Marjorie Perloff criticizes the diminishing role of form and formal constraints in contemporary poetry. Her argument is in general that today’s free verse has freed itself from all the formal constraints that have normally defined poetry, rhymes, rhythm, meter, and caesurae. It is just lineated prose, which designates “an ironized narrative or, more frequently, the personal expression of a particular insight, presented in sometimes striking figurative language”. She does not believe in a return to classical forms, but nevertheless she wonders whether poetry is becoming expendable: If it loses its formal constraints, what would distinguish it as a genre and as an art form? Her strategy for the continuous relevance of poetry is not to take up the old forms, but enact new kinds of formal constraints in the heritage of the French-international group of writers, Oulipo (<span class="foreignWord">Ouvroir de littérature potentielle</span>, “Workshop of Potential Literature”). Oulipo has from 1960 onwards worked to unleash potential literature by applying constrained writing techniques, often mathematical, algorithmic, or lexicographic, or by otherwise treating language and meaning in formal, structural ways . She emphasizes how the formal constraint in Oulipo writings “creates a formal structure whose rules of composition are internalized so that the constraint in question is not only a rule but a thematic property of the poem.” This approach to form she develops in continuation of the Oulipo law, which the Oulipian author Jacques Roubaud summarizes as “A text written according to constraint describes the constraint”.</p>
<p>When discussing how the computer and the web challenge our notions of literature, reading and writing, this formal perspective is important. We might not know that much about the changes brought about in our millennial tradition of reading, writing, and text to the point where we can already make clear assessments, but by experimenting with formal constraints and how these constraints become thematic properties, as suggested by Perloff, we ourselves can discover how text is treated in our contemporary literary machines. The heritage of Oulipo seems especially well suited, since it already has integrated algorithms, code, and formal logic into the world of literature. In his brilliant cultural history of code, Florian Cramer pointed out how Oulipo writers can be seen as forerunners to later net.art and software art in the sense that they were not invested in the rationalist, modernist belief in the possibility of encoding art and aesthetics, which was predominant on the German scene in the Max Bense group:</p>
<p>(…) Oulipo considered formalisms and computations neither a poetic end in themselves, nor a philosophical-ideological base. Oulipo created a computational poetics as anti-computational poetics, using computational formalisms for the sole end of circumventing them artistically. (…) Oulipo made it their game to let imagination fight against self-imposed formalism and have it triumph in the end .</p>
<p>However, Cramer points out that Oulipo did not yet connect their algorithms to a cultural situation created by computing, as did later net.art and software art. Today, PC and WWW have become part of our everyday culture, and their interfaces have become important aesthetic and cultural forms or media for writing and reading . Therefore we need to re-think the concept of digital literature through the interface as a concrete, technological, and theoretical framework in order to be better guided towards understanding digital literature in its current cultural environment. Instead of utopian ‘beyond-the-book’ thinking, we can with the interface as framework understand literature within a real and existing representational form which exists next to the book and even incorporates formal elements from the book . Therefore, I suggest looking at the interface as a new medium for the understanding of digital literature in order to understand more precisely how digital literature critically explores its own forms.</p>
<p>I will defend this perspective by looking at a specific writer and his work. The Paris-based, French writer and net-artist, Christophe Bruno, has explicitly linked his work with Oulipoan experiments <cite class="note" id="note_2"><a href="http://www.iterature.com/dreamlogs/faq.php">http://www.iterature.com/dreamlogs/faq.php</a> (visited 3 August 2006).</cite> and his general poetics can be described in continuation of the Oulipian understanding of constraints in the sense that he plays with these in order to describe them and discover their aesthetic, cultural, and political meaning. He has made a collection of works with the heading and address <span class="booktitle">Iterature.com</span>. It is a collection of literary experiments with the networked text of the WWW through various Google hacks, that is, Google ‘front ends’ that turn a Google search into a literary engagement with the text of the web. Bruno’s thesis is that through the web, and especially through our ability to search and monitor it thoroughly by means of Google, we are heading towards a global text that among other things enables a new form of textual, semantic capitalism, which he explores in his work. In the following, I will introduce some of his most important works on the Iterature website in order to discuss the transformation of texts, reading, writing, and capitalism currently being generated by Google and similar services as well as by general developments on the web commonly discussed under headings such as web2.0. <cite class="note" id="note_3">Christophe Bruno writes about these issues himself in various introductions and essays on <a href="http://www.iterature.com">www.iterature.com</a> and notably in (Goriunova et al. 2004) and (Goriunova 2005) I will return to web 2.0 below.</cite></p>
<h2>2. Critical plot machines</h2>
<p>Christophe Bruno’s <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span> stages our search for meaning and coherence on the web and in general through literary machinations or plottings. If a novel sets up a plot to form its world in a certain way and thereby makes us aware of certain connections when we read the novel and explore its plot, the machinations of <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span> are certainly plots in this sense, though like most modern novels, the plots are not always coherent but only present the sometimes melancholic, sometimes paranoid, sometimes utopian urge for this coherence.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Iterature</span> is a still growing collection of pieces or documentations of performances, currently about a dozen, which are all written with the text from the web as material. All the pieces use search engines, primarily Google, to get hold of text floating around the web and use it as raw material for various re-workings, cut-ups, algorithmic text generations, visualizations, and so forth. Most of the pieces allow for user input, which is typically used as input for a Google search. The result of this search is then used to generate an output, which is a literary adaptation of the search result. In short, the pieces write the networked text, or set up plots that let the reader experience how the network gets connected.</p>
<p>The most technically simple piece, “Life,” is a staging of the basic narcissistic search, where one searches for one’s own key characteristics. It explores a narcissistic cybernetic process - an autobiography-on-demand - where one, via input in an empty text field in a predefined text written by Bruno, constructs an autobiography in the left window of the screen. Guided by the already written text around the empty fields, you typically start with your name, and date and place of birth, but further down you have to fill in more private and peculiar things, all of which trigger Google searches in the right window of the screen.</p>
<p><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/fig1.jpg" width="400" height="234" /></p>
<p>Figure 1. Christophe Bruno’s Life (by courtesy of Christophe Bruno - <a class="outbound" href="http://www.iterature.com/life/">http://www.iterature.com/life/</a></p>
<p>During the process of searching for your own autobiography, or perhaps more precisely the text, context or pretext of your life, you might discover an encyclopedic narration through the databases of the web with your own life as the leitmotif. In spite of its technical simplicity (as just a simple front end for Google), “Life” highlights how the most personal and identifying words live their own life and form new contexts on the web. In this sense it can be experienced as a work about identity in network society, where one can explore how one’s life is linked to the web or how the text of the web has already woven itself around it. It is well-known from literary autobiographies and literature dealing with the grammatical first person that the written self is never self-identical, but always displaced and disfigured through the retrospective process of remembrance, the arranging of things in meaningful and narrative ways, and the structure of writing and language. However, in “Life” this condition is demonstrated in an unusually straightforward way, through one’s life and the events characterizing it, literally becoming nodes in a network. “Life” cannot be read as one linear text; rather it is a web to explore, to re-read, and it is not held together by one perspective but is spread out in many perspectives - one’s life and its context seen by many others. As such it demonstrates and radicalizes Rimbaud’s famous quote, “je est un autre”. The autobiography is no longer written in the self-possessed first person, but in the third person and in fact in the plural, and if you delve into this process, you potentially discover yourself to be like ‘several others’.</p>
<p>Even though “Life” is rather simple technically and merely stages the process of narcissistically searching for the traces of one’s own life, it becomes clear from “Life” how writing, reading, and searching are intricately connected. In addition, questions about who the author is and who controls the text come to the fore. Even though it is clear that Christophe Bruno stages the plot machines, that the user writes the input, and that the more or less anonymous masses write the output we get through Google, Bruno’s work experiments with plotting how this mass or web of text is acting and being controlled.</p>
<p>Google’s potentially growing control of the web is the focus of another work, “The Google AdWords Happening,” which does not work directly with the search algorithms of Google, but instead focuses on how Google makes money from our search inquiries. Google’s AdWords are the small “sponsored links” on the right side of the screen that appear with your search results and on web pages that license Google to handle their advertisements. Bruno started four campaigns on the search words “symptom,” “dream,” “mary,” and “money,” with small poetic messages and a link to his web site <a class="outbound" href="http://www.unbehagen.com">www.unbehagen.com</a>, and his campaign was shown 12,000 times in 24 hours. However, it was quickly censured by Google because the click-through rate was too low, which led Google to (automatically!) deem them irrelevant. Still, the happening revealed an interesting list of the estimated price of using different words as ad-words, which demonstrates that words get a price tag calculated on the basis of Google’s immense overview of our search behavior. This process demonstrates, as Bruno himself points out, the evolution of generalized global semantic capitalism <cite class="note" id="note_4">Bruno points this out on the project webpage <a href="http://www.iterature.com/adwords/">http://www.iterature.com/adwords/</a> (visited 3 August 2006) and in (Goriunova et al. 2004)</cite> that is fully governed by supply and demand as calculated through the search engine. However, the search engine itself is not a commercial good on this market: it is the very technology that enables the market. Generalized semantic capitalism is, according to Bruno, generated and served by Google. As exemplified by the happening, it even performs its own effective censorship, which is not based on politics or ethics in a traditional sense, but on the effectiveness and flow of the market. The censuring of the AdWords Happening also shows that this semantic capitalism is potentially misled through ambiguities and the poetic use of language, and as a matter of fact Google even knows this somehow - hence the censorship.</p>
<p><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/fig2.jpg" width="400" height="277" /></p>
<p>Figure 2. Extract from Christophe Bruno’s AdWords Happening (by courtesy of Christophe Bruno - <a class="outbound" href="http://www.iterature.com/adwords/">http://www.iterature.com/adwords/</a>).</p>
<p>The AdWords Happening explores what happens when words are no longer only part of a language (the structuralist “langue”), functioning according to a particular speech act or communicational situation (the structuralist “parole”) with a sender and a receiver, but are also becoming indexes to a database of the global text of the web, in this case Google. Instead of the rather hierarchical and homogeneous advertising structures of earlier portals and media, where comparatively large advertisers dominate with univocal messages, Google has, with its avoidance of the commercial portal format with the dominating banner ads and an abundance of highly visible services that was common before Google, moved advertising further from the broadcasting mode to a more networked and individually targeted format. We are used to words transforming into logos, slogans, brands, and trademarks which to some extent control our language and semantics, but Google and the web offer a much finer-grained and effective commercialization and control of language and semantics. Instead of having to create brand recognizance on a global scale and influence the way individual consumers react to words and carry out semantic processes, advertisers can now work in much more detail with specialized, local words and contexts. They do not have to implant themselves in the minds of everybody in order to be recognized instantly in case someone should want a soft drink or a MP3 Player; but they can market themselves ‘just in time’ via Google AdWords by making sure that they are at the top of the results when a consumer expresses his desire through a search entry. This method might spare us some stupefying exposure to mass marketing, but it will simultaneously aim at rendering our semantics more ‘effective’ in relation to its functional and marketing goals. Such a method is, in short, the effect of generalized semantic capitalism and its promotion and reinforcement of the commercial semantics of logos, trademarks, domain names, and so on. <cite class="note" id="note_5">Past work that has dealt with the commercialization of words on the web is Etoy’s <span class="booktitle">Toywar</span> <a href="http://toywar.etoy.com/">http://toywar.etoy.com/</a>, which explored (and was caused by) the new discourse economy of the web fuelled by the commercialization of domain names and search words. Recently, Ubermorgen released the very sophisticated and intelligent “Google Will Eat Itself,” which “generate[s] money by serving Google text advertisements on a network of hidden Websites” and uses the money to buy Google shares, thus cybernetically turning the semantic capitalism generated by AdWords back into the capitalization of Google. The project currently predicts that taking over Google will take 202.345.127 years (<a href="http://www.gwei.org">http://www.gwei.org</a>, 3 August 2006).</cite> In such functional terms, semantics should be predictable, controllable, and thus univocal, which rules out irony and the equivocal explorations of language normally found in poetry and poetic uses of language. Therefore, it is significant that the AdWords Happening got censored, since it is evidence of a new function of language which AdWords exemplify but which also operates on a larger, though less controllable, scale with the Web itself and its mediation through search engines and other major entrances.</p>
<p><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/fig3.jpg" width="400" height="281" /></p>
<p>Figure 3. Christophe Bruno’s Epiphanies (by courtesy of Christophe Bruno - <a class="outbound" href="http://www.iterature.com/epiphanies)">http://www.iterature.com/epiphanies</a>.</p>
<h2>3. Reading and writing the global text</h2>
<p>As the above pieces show, <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span> is critical of the globalized text stitched together by Google from the web, and especially of the control and exploitation that Google enacts with its generalized semantic capitalism. However, <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span> is also a poetic play on the global text and the urge to obtain meaningful glimpses into it. We do not only search for clearly defined answers, but also for answers to questions we did not know existed - concerning the surprising, unknown, strangely meaningful, even the sacred and metaphysical. Pieces like “Epiphanies” enable a flaneur-like search that generates a text with formal similarities to James Joyce’s epiphanies such as they are described in <span class="booktitle">Stephen Hero</span> as a “sudden spiritual manifestation” in everyday surroundings and speech. What is more, the actual quoted epiphanies in Joyce’s text have the same “…” which typographically marks omissions in a quotation and which one also finds when Google displays its search results with bits of the text from the referred websites. “Epiphanies” directs the searches, scans the resulting text from Google, and serves it as an epiphany, which it occasionally might be. At least sometimes a “sudden spiritual manifestation” of meaning is revealed by the way the piece creates new coherences out of pseudo-anonymous found text. As in Joyce, “Epiphanies” seems to be about how a spirited reading can actually perform coherence and create meaning in a contingent and disparate situation or text. It does not suggest a preconceived metaphysical coherence, but shows and enacts how coherence is potentially constructed in the situation, in the reading. It thus demonstrates a meaning that does not stem from the predetermined, but thrives on the equivocal, the implicit, the accidental, and the associative. The epiphanies can also be contemplated in the piece titled “Fields,” where they appear as floating text fields instead of static texts.</p>
<p><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/fig4.jpg" width="400" height="287" /></p>
<p>Figure 4. Christophe Bruno’s Gogolchat (modified by jimpunk) (by courtesy of Christophe Bruno - <a class="outbound" href="http://www.iterature.com/gogolchat">http://www.iterature.com/gogolchat</a>).</p>
<p>In another piece, “Gogolchat,” developed out of the same basic techniques, the web text is fed through a character by the name of Gogol. Besides being the Russian author of <span class="booktitle">Diary of Madman</span>, Gogol is a pseudo-anagram on the word Google, and Gogol/Google is the rambling resident of “Gogolchat”. As the polite but quite disturbing host of this chat, he communicates with whomever present about whatever they write - his speech is generated by algorithms similar to those in “Epiphanies” and “Fields.” Parts of the text one writes in the chat are used as input in a Google search which generates Gogol’s writings. This recylcing creates a communication situation where Gogol often responds to what is said by changing languages if one writes in another language or by chatting about the same subject and keywords - for example, by suddenly introducing one of the guests of the chat in the middle of what appears to be self-centered stream of consciousness. Such a situation is quoted below. In this sequence Gogol picks acquires my name from “unbehagen” (Christophe Bruno’s pseudonym) and finds a greeting from an old online posting of mine, which in this context reappears in Gogol’s discourse:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">unbehagen : do you know soeren pold ?<br />
Gogol : human beings … suspected that he was pleased being alone at YMCA … who likes The Who, Bukowski, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Dickens and … …<br />
Gogol : Turgenev : Virgin Soil : … Gogol’s Boulevard became such a place for me … to the un­righteous, And is also Gogol’s feeding pig … Or like me, working in a room, alone, Watching out … … The departure point of Romanowicz’s novels is her World War II concentration …<br />
unbehagen : chatting alone with gogol<br />
Gogol : … Dr … … Upgrade Bulletin Dear All, we are glad to inform … … Sincerely, Soeren Pold, Lecturer and researcher in literature and multimedia aesthetics … … … … …<br />
impun&lt; : Il etait une fois la revolu.mp3<br />
yuban : prof. pold we know who you are</p>
<p>“jimpunk” is a net-artist that once ‘hacked’ “Gogolchat” by filling its interface with visual junk from the web: obscure images, animations, links, and even sounds. This hacking job was recorded and is now a permanent part of the “Gogolchat” experience. Sometimes jimpunk’s visual interference completely takes over the interface and renders the communication hardly readable. Still, Gogol rambles on - even if he does not get input. The searches that generate his output are supplemented by some default key words that make Gogol go on and on in a monomaniac way and give him a preference for slightly subversive issues (sex, terrorism, religion, pop groups and even literature…):</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Gogol: Cliquez ici !Lien commercialArabe-Arabes … Arabe-Arabes … Bienvenue sur Arabe-Arabes … … … HARD-PUTE … La référence des sites sur le sexe … … … Femmes-Black … … &lt; … … Femmes B …<br />
Gogol : paranoia, paranoia … … Even if this is just some nutcase trying to scare people, it doesn’t help my sense of paranoia … … TIR sector contains an …</p>
<p>Both the interface and Gogol are so noisy and intrusive that “Gogolchat” creates its own kind of discourse. Often Gogol steals the agenda and the users continue to discuss his output, or the users actually end up trying to communicate directly with Gogol, which on the other hand is seldom satisfying. This scenario is not unlike discussions on mailing lists or chat forums with many users, where there can be many threads that entangle the discussion. In comparison, Gogol is almost totally promiscuous and constantly weaves the text of the web into the discourse with its flow of text, system messages, links, graphics, and buttons. A special discursive situation is created, influenced by the constant intervention or chatter of the web - like an amplification of the typical situation of trying to do focused work on a networked PC with e-mails, Messenger, advertising, and the constant possibility of checking the millions of persuasive blogs and websites competing to divert our attention. Instead of a traditional understanding of communication as the passing of a message from a sender to a receiver, “Gogolchat” demonstrates a highly mediated communication situation in which the medium becomes a personalized participant in the communication through the Gogol character and through jimpunk’s interface hacks. Like agents and advertising, it constantly interferes, guided cybernetically by the current act of writing and interaction, though Gogol is much more surprising and witty than commercial attempts to create cybernetic agents such as Microsoft’s Clippy (even though Clippy’s interventions are often absurd as well). <cite class="note" id="note_6">Since its first appearance in 2005, Gogol has had physical brothers and sisters in “The Human Browser” project, which is a series of performances with an actor, wireless internet, and a PDA. The actor talks to bypassers, but her speech is generated by a Google hack similar to “Gogolchat” and fed to the actor through wireless headphones and text-to-speech software. Until now the PDA has normally been handled by Bruno. “The Human Browser” is reminiscent of “Gogolchat” but has the added dimension of the user being able to talk to an actual human being in a public space, which is a very strange and funny experience. Bruno has also worked consciously with site- and situation-specific issues such as performing “The Human Browser” outside polling stations at the confused EU constitution vote in France in May 2005. From the perspective of this article, “The Human Browser” demonstrates how interface literature can function as performance through an incarnated interface.</cite></p>
<p><img src="../../sites/electronicbookreview.com/files/essays/fig5.jpg" width="400" height="454" /></p>
<p>Figure 5. The result of a blog generated in Christophe Bruno’s “Dreamlogs” (by courtesy of Christophe Bruno - <a class="outbound" href="http://www.iterature.com/dreamlogs">http://www.iterature.com/dreamlogs</a>).</p>
<p>With “Gogolchat” Bruno stages web text as the lines of a fictional character. In “Dreamlogs” he continues to experiment with using autobiography as a format to create formal coherence in web text. “Dreamlogs” is a piece that uses the blog format to create a special combination of searching, reading, and writing. Blogs or weblogs appeared on the web at the end of the 1990s; in 1999, the popular Blogger software appeared, which is software that helps the user to write and publish a blog, and since then a number of alternative software and services have emerged, and Blogger has been bought by Google. A blog consists of postings that are temporally categorized and can also be categorized according to self-elected groupings or “tags,” with the newest post on top to emphasize the dynamic character of the blog. Often blogs offer their readers the possibility of leaving comments and TrackBacks, which is a technology that supports bidirectional links and thus enables a communicative social space, the so-called blogosphere. Of course, blogs contain many different kinds of content, but often they contain personal comments on news, developments on the web, and life in general, sometimes with a professional view such as blogs related to academic research of various kinds. Blogs are often driven by a personal voice that comments and reflects on events in a genre that combines diary, autobiography, blatant self-promotion, and essayistic writing. Often the writing is short and rich with links, so reading a blog is a mixture of traditional reading and surfing - a way of keeping updated with the networked text. Writers of blogs are also often writers that read other blogs and participate in the dialogical blogosphere. In short, the distinctions between reader and writer are diminishing since blog software and services make it easy to publish, make comments, and configure and rearrange one’s reading material through hyperlinks and web feeds. <cite class="note" id="note_7">Web feeds or RSS feeds enable feed readers or some browsers to show an updated list of the headers of a blog or a news site which links directly to the relevant articles. For further discussion of blogs, see Gurak, Laura J et. al (eds.). <span class="booktitle">Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs</span>. June 2004 (<a href="http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/">http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/</a>).</cite> Ultimately, blogs reuse the writings of other blogs either openly as quotations or as content theft, which is when the content of select blogs is republished in order to earn money from, for instance, Google AdWords.</p>
<p>In Bruno’s “Dreamlogs” the user is first asked to write some words, and these yield a number of search results from Google. From these search results the user then chooses new words to generate new search results, and so on, in a process that does not end until the user writes a word which does not yield any results or chooses to stop and press “save”. Saving generates a blog consisting of texts and images related to the search words, with the latest ones at the top. The result is a blog which, consistent with the conventions of the blog genre, produces expectations of some sort of personal and temporal coherence in the text, though in this case the text is taken from the web without any coherence besides that created through the search and choice process described above. Nonetheless it is interesting to both read and write “Dreamlogs” if one engages some hermeneutic effort in the project, and it frequently generates interesting juxtapositions and findings. Besides, it explores the kind of reading that blogs generally support: an associative, often superficial reading or scanning via search engines, links, and the occasional finding. As a piece of literary art it is remarkable that it enacts reading, writing, and publishing in the same process. At its best, “Dreamlogs” is a literary tool to write a meaningful search through the text of the web.</p>
<h2>4. Interface text</h2>
<p>In the introduction, I briefly discussed the notion that the book was in a crisis due to the new possibilities offered by interactive hypertexts. The book is still the primary medium of literature, but as Christophe Bruno’s work demonstrates, substantial changes are taking place in the concept and materiality of text as well as in the culture of reading and writing, since it is increasingly connected to networked interfaces. These changes are significant and of great magnitude for current literary and textual culture, even though major parts of literature will continue to use the book in the foreseeable future. <cite class="note" id="note_8">How these changes will influence literature in book form is a question that is beyond the scope of this article. However, media changes are complex cultural processes, and it is never just a question of exchanging one technology for another. It is worth mentioning that many literary theories, concepts, and techniques of relevance to digital literature have been developed in connection with print technology: the importance of poststructuralist theory in hypertext, William Gibson’s ‘invention’ of cyberspace in a printed novel, Oulipo’s algorithmic experiments in book formats, etc. A number of books currently discuss literary history and theory encompassing the digital media perspective to the extent that it may be possible to claim that literary history and the literary field is being rewritten from a digital perspective. Examples of this include (Hayles 2002), (Cramer 2005), and (Pold 2004).</cite></p>
<p>In digital aesthetics we can now trace a development from an emphasis on the forms of reception of the individual user or reader by discussing degrees and forms of interactivity to discussions of the materiality of digital art and how this materiality can lead to new art praxes, distribution forms, and so forth. <cite class="note" id="note_9">E.g., remix culture, bastard pop, mash up, cut-up videos, and on a larger cultural scale the battle over copyright versus copyleft or creative commons, software patents and free software/ open source; see, e.g., (Lessig 2004), (Stalder 2005) and (Nielsen and Pold 2005)</cite> Perhaps this gradual shift from the interactive “open work” (as Umberto Eco famously described it in 1962) to a more material and cultural openness can in fact be understood as a continuation of the poststructuralist concept of text and intertextuality. In short, there seems to be less emphasis on the openness of the structure of the single work and more on the cultural and economic function of the work. These aspects can be viewed as two sides of the same coin. And of course the interactive open work is not something that we have moved beyond, but perhaps interactivity in interfaces is, as argued by Lev Manovich, increasingly seen as a tautology, since “[m]odern HCI is by its very definition interactive” ; or perhaps the ‘ideology’ of interactivity - such as in the concept of interactive fiction - has been overblown to a degree that already in 1997, according to Espen Aarseth, it deserved a total reversal: “…interactive fiction is perhaps best understood as a fiction: the fiction of interactivity.” .</p>
<p>Aarseth instead proposes the concept of “ergodics,” but this concept is still preoccupied with the structural openness or dynamic character of the artifact - that every user can chose his own path in the work - and it does not fully grasp the cultural, intertextual openness that I propose here, though Aarseth does point at multiuser texts such as MUDs and MOOs. Lev Manovich proposes concepts such as “modularity” and “post-media aesthetics,” which seem more to the point , but I propose to go further back to the concept of “text” as described by Roland Barthes, since this concept has been, and I believe still is, central; despite the fact that it was developed before the personal computer and the internet became standard, it seems well suited to reflect the changes that are taking place in the concept and materiality of text.</p>
<p>In 1971 Roland Barthes presented a new concept of text for literary theory in the short article “From Work to Text” , continuing the work of theoreticians such as Eco, Kristeva, Foucault, and Derrida. Literary theory should, according to Barthes, move from the study of substantial, unique, and original works to the study of text as a methodological field - from the study of the author’s work to the study of the text as a material that is governed by a metonymic process, an activity of associations, contiguities, and cross-references. Whereas the work is an object of consumption and consumer culture, the text “decants the work (…) from its consumption and recuperates it as play, task, production, practice,” so that reading and writing in Barthes’ terms become linked together “into one and the same signifying practice” .</p>
<p>In 2000 N. Katherine Hayles commented that Barthes’ prescient essay has been highly influential, but also problematic in the sense that its generalized concept of text has led to a blindness towards the specificity of media. The poststructural and semiotic concept of text has been applied to all kinds of cultural products and across all aesthetic fields without resistance from the material dimensions of various media. Hayles suggests that “[p]erhaps now, after the linguistic turn has yielded so many important insights, it is time to turn again to a careful consideration of what difference the medium makes” and proposes a medium-specific analysis . But perhaps we can still use Barthes’ concept of text to discuss digital literary works and their medium-specific materiality; in other words, use Barthes’ concept with new medium-specificity?</p>
<p>Digital art and literature such as Christophe Bruno’s works described above share a number of characteristics with the concept of text, whether they express themselves through alphabetical text or other multimedia. In addition, digital artifacts consist of text in the form of source code, and the struggle over whether this source code should be proprietary, patented, trademarked, unreadable or open, readable and (re-)writeable open source is a struggle that could be (partly) understood in Barthesian terms. <cite class="note" id="note_10">See, e.g., (Cramer 2001) and (Bertelsen and Pold 2003).</cite> With its focus on text as an intertextual flowing material and its integration of reading and writing, “Dreamlogs” is almost a literal staging of the concept of text as introduced by Barthes. It points to a development where the poststructuralist concepts of text and intertextuality are carried out with a remarkable literalness. Instead of being applied metaphorically to works by Joyce or Proust, it is literally true for Christophe Bruno’s works that “<span class="lightEmphasis">the Text is experienced only in an activity, in a production</span>. It follows that the Text cannot stop (for example, at a library shelf); its constitutive moment is <span class="lightEmphasis">traversal</span> (notably, it can traverse the work, several works)” . Just think of “Epiphanies,” “Dreamlogs,” or “Gogolchat,” which also have the associative, rambling, differentiating character that Barthes invokes by comparing text to an idle stroll:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">“the reader of the Text might be compared to an idle subject (…): this fairly empty subject strolls (…) along a hillside at the bottom of which flows a wadi (I use the word to attest to a certain alienation); what he perceives is multiple, irreducible, issuing from heterogeneous, detached substances and levels: lights, colors, vegetation, heat, air, tenuous explosions of sound, tiny cries of birds, children’s voices from the other side of the valley, paths, gestures, garments of inhabitants close by or very far away; all these incidents are half identifiable: they issue from known codes, but their combinative operation is unique, it grounds the stroll in a difference which cannot be repeated except <span class="lightEmphasis">as difference</span>.”</p>
<p>“Gogolchat,” “Dreamlogs,” and “Epiphanies” are literally texts “entirely woven of quotations, references, echoes: cultural languages (…) antecedent or contemporary, which traverse [them] through and through, in a vast stereophony.” In fact, one does not read <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span> as much as play it in the polysemy of the term Barthes suggests: the text plays, the reader plays at the text, and he plays the text in the sense of executing it. However, one should be aware of reading Barthes too literally, since he is not pointing to a new object (and of course could neither foresee the web nor imagine <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span>), but to a methodological field. The work still exists (as a concept, a metaphor, or an ideal) as “the Text’s imaginary tail”: “the work is held in the hand, the text is held in language” .</p>
<p>How should we understand this textual character when considering <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span>? <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span>’s enactment of the Barthesian concept of text is literal, not theoretical, metaphorical or ideal in any sense. Consequently, it does not fulfill any utopian notions of a potential anti-authorial liberation of text from the homogeneous work. The intertextual weaving of references is in fact carried out by computers on the web, and it is not an idle reading freeing us from the fixed paths of the work. We must take into account that the text of <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span> is controlled and generated by algorithms and computers mostly beyond Bruno’s control - some at Google, some at the websites that Google indexes, and some at Iterature.com - and these literary pieces are something other than traditional search results or web pages. In fact, Bruno’s algorithms serve to make us realize and witness the instrumentalization of text on the web and at Google; they also show us how Google’s index and search algorithms turn all of the web into one big global pool of text that can be analyzed and quantified, taken apart, measured, and tracked in many ways before being synthesized again by being stitched or woven together anew by links, indexes, mappings, search engines, and other text generators in, for instance, dynamic web pages. When we do a normal search, we do not fully realize this instrumentalization, but Bruno’s algorithms stage and narrate this as autobiography, epiphany, and chat communication. In this way, his algorithms make us marvel at the global text so that we can read it and read it in new and interesting ways, often through chance encounters and strange cut-ups; but it also lets us deconstruct the phenomenon when we try to figure out how this text is generated - for instance, in an attempt to discover who or what is writing.</p>
<p>The global text might pose problems for the passive consumption that characterizes the consumer economy, as can be seen from the textualization (in Barthes’ sense) of music through remix culture and bastard pop (cf. ), but it can also feed its own new economy, which is suggested by “The Google AdWords Happening” and Bruno’s subsequent concept of a generalized semantic capitalism. The semantic capitalism of Google AdWords is created through intertextual linking and association structures that surf smoothly on the global text, but the semantics are still one-way: click here, buy this! If more open poetic semantics are introduced into this, the direct marketing value drops - the system becomes sloppy, which is detected by Google’s algorithms. Introducing a ‘textual’ reading into the marketing scheme leads to censorship, and the fact that even this censorship is enacted by an algorithm only adds to the critical irony! In fact, “The Google AdWords Happening” illustrates how <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span> tackles the global text of Google by using the system in a non-intentional and open way. Instead of obeying the rules, it <span class="lightEmphasis">plays</span> them and thereby lets the reader enjoy the algorithms while simultaneously deconstructing their functionality.</p>
<h2>5. The global text or web 2.0</h2>
<p><span class="booktitle">Iterature</span> reflects a situation in which web text is beginning to act as a generalized global text technically removed from its borders and framings such as pages, authors, readers, linearity, stability, or beginnings, and ends. The text has become a system by technical means. <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span> explores this system by staging it and using the system in non-intentional ways, thereby openly demonstrating this new character instead of just masking it as functionality - for example, as contextualized advertisements, links, indexes, collages of texts functioning as summaries, and so forth. The duality played out by <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span> of, on the one hand, textual systems or tools for text and, on the other, new textual ways of publishing, reading, and writing is not only a feature of <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span>, but a general new trend that is increasingly acknowledged under headings such as Web 2.0 or social (networking) software. <cite class="note" id="note_11">See (O’Reilly 2005) and (“Wikipedia”) (“web 2.0” and “social software,” retrieved 18 Jan. 06).</cite></p>
<p>Web 2.0 is a rather loosely defined concept for a number of sites and services that use the web as a platform for communication, collaboration, and sharing. It ranges from business and company models that use the web as their platform and build on user-generated content (with Google as one of its key examples) to “a social phenomenon referring to an approach to creating and distributing Web content itself, characterized by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and re-use, and ‘the market as a conversation’ ” (Wikipedia, <a class="outbound" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web2.0">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web2.0</a> (Retrieved 18 Jan. ‘06)). Web 2.0 and social software ranges from establishing new kinds of technologies and businesses and hyping these as a new boom economy to cultural and social movements and practices creating digital commons, critical reflection, and public spaces. Consequently, in contemporary net culture we see the same mix of textual systems and textual use as pointed out above in relation to <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span>. This is also described in Jill Walker’s recent article on these new web developments, where she argues that hypertext has gone wild or “feral.” <cite class="note" id="note_12">She does not explicitly mention the concept of web 2.0, but she mentions some of the same applications as O’Reilly, such as the photo-sharing website <span class="booktitle">flickr</span> (<a href="http://www.flickr.com/">http://www.flickr.com/</a>) and the social bookmarking website <span class="booktitle">del.icio.us</span> (<a href="http://del.icio.us/">http://del.icio.us/</a>). At around the same time as blogs became popular, peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as Napster emerged and had great effect on discussions of copyright and file sharing. In pure P2P networks there are no central servers or routers; instead, peers act as both clients and servers, and therefore the network itself is emergent.</cite> She claims that pre-web hypertext was largely “a domesticated species bred in captivity,” self-contained and with authorial control intact. She also draws attention to the paradox inherent in George P. Landow’s13 <cite class="note" id="note_13">Cf. (Landow 1992).</cite> convergence between hypertext and contemporary literary theory, and discusses the contradictions or even reversals of poststructuralist literary theory in hypertext with reference to intertextuality:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">…[T]he concept of intertextuality and much other late twentieth century critical theory expresses an idea of texts as <span class="lightEmphasis">unruly</span> and fundamentally beyond discipline. Much hypertext research, on the other hand, attempts to find ways to discipline and tame our thoughts, at the same time as it admits that our mind works associatively and that there are multiple ways of viewing connections in texts.</p>
<p>The kinds of feral hypertexts she refers to are “the large collaborative projects that generate patterns and meanings without any clear authors or editors controlling the linking” and “these systems work because they have simple but flexible ground conditions that establish environments that make emergent organization instantly visible” . One of the techniques often used - for instance, in <span class="booktitle">flickr</span> and <span class="booktitle">del.icio.us</span> - is user-created tags, the so-called folksonomies (a combination of “folk” and “taxonomy”), where users are free to create their own tags, attach as many as they like to each item, share them with others, and search for similar tags. In this way one can easily and effectively, but also idiosyncratically, create an emergent user-created taxonomy in a user-created database consisting of, for instance, photos (<span class="booktitle">flickr</span>), bookmarks (<span class="booktitle">del.icio.us</span>), or academic references (<span class="booktitle">CiteULike</span>- <a class="outbound" href="http://www.citeulike.org">http://www.citeulike.org</a>). Walker describes how these are closer to associative links and Barthesian distractions than the traditional authored links of hypertext or the professionally cleared trails of Vannevar Bush, the grandfather of hypertext:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">These links are not paths cleared by the professional trail-blazers Vannevar Bush dreamed of, they are more like sheep paths in the mountains, paths that have formed over time as many animals and people just happened to use them. Once formed, it is easier to use such a path than to blaze a new trail. .</p>
<p>According to Walker, an effect of folksonomy is that many tags are idiosyncratic and ambiguous, an outcome which is not avoided in an effort to distinguish between different meanings of the same word, as the ideal of the semantic web would have it . In fact, this open taxonomy also creates meaningful coincidences that have either poetic potentiality or significance on a larger social and political scale. An example of this is the “Bush” cluster in <span class="booktitle">flickr</span>: its neighboring tags are “protest,” “war,” “iraq,” “march” and so on, and in this way a certain context is created around the word “Bush” which reflects the political situation. There is also a function in <span class="booktitle">flickr</span> that makes it possible set up and define a group, which in many cases creates a themed photo exhibition out of the image collection.<cite class="note" id="note_14">Good examples are the numerous groups of images that illustrate poems or quotations from literature such as Kafkaesque images that alludes to the atmosphere of Franz Kafka’s work (there are currently more than 4000 photos). Another interesting group of images are the images of writing machines. Bush clusters: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/bush/clusters/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/bush/clusters/</a>, Kafkaesque: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/kafka/">http://www.flickr.com/groups/kafka/</a>, Writing Machines: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/27475260@N00/">http://www.flickr.com/groups/27475260@N00/</a> [all visited 3 August 2006].</cite> Of course. this is not a fully bottom-up emergent structure, but still everybody can propose tags and groups, decide on the openness of the group, and, in the open groups, join and post what they wish. Nonetheless, the open folksonomic taxonomy potentially leads to heterogeneous collections and impossible classifications like Borges’s Chinese encyclopedia, which opens Foucault’s <span class="booktitle">The Order of Things</span> - classifications that are not ordered with stable relations and categories . As in language, semantics, and culture, the categories and their relations are dynamic, emergent, and created by context, contiguity and poetic plays on words, as well as on hierarchy, similarity, and the preconceived, lexical meaning of words. Such open and emergent dynamics are essential to the cultural effect and use of the web, to the development of a net(work) culture.</p>
<h2>6. <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span>’s treatments of text</h2>
<p>In the light of these developments, we have gained a more qualified understanding of <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span>. <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span> demonstrates and reflects on these developments, which are on the one hand technical in nature, and on the other hand are related to the culture of reading, writing, and publishing. Of course, the technical side implements and supports the cultural side, while the cultural side develops the techniques through use and renders them meaningful in a cultural execution of technical, formal algorithms. It is a dialectical development process, both in general (think of the development of hypertext and the web) and in particular with web 2.0: services such as <span class="booktitle">del.icio.us</span>, <span class="booktitle">flickr</span> and Google keep adding functionality by studying user behavior, perhaps starting with some playful ideas and treating users as co-developers in a so-called “perpetual beta” release process . But as argued by Walker and others, sometimes the technical side also reverses the cultural side, such as when the semantic web aims at specifying and standardizing language to get rid of ambiguity. <cite class="note" id="note_15">In fact, <span class="booktitle">Iterature.com</span> has a small comment on semantic web and XML on its front page under the heading “XML: the end of iterature?” Perhaps if the semantic web really worked smoothly it would mean the end of the poetic displacements and ironies of <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span>. For a discussion of the semantic web, see (Berners-Lee 2001) and <span class="booktitle">Wikipedia</span> (e.g., “The Semantic Web,” “XML”).</cite></p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Iterature</span> consists of works that explore a new economy: how text is distributed, rewritten, and re-contextualized by search engines and the net. Bruno’s work uses the enormous database of text and the way Google makes it accessible. It uses the text of the web in algorithmic plot machines which stages in various ways what happens to text when it escapes the boundaries of the book and the page and flows kinetically and cybernetically in the network. Even though the text we read is primarily written by humans and not by computers, it becomes removed and alienated from its immediate context and put into a new one by Bruno’s search and cut-up algorithms. It is a literary staging of the text of the net and of the user’s search project, and through this literary re-contextualization and alienation the text is removed from its immediate and natural context, allowing us to see beyond the immediate utterance towards the enunciative situation and the textual character and its material and behavior.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Iterature</span>’s output is no more alienating than the many textual screens greeting us in urban spaces or the text we normally get from a search engine or a dynamic 2.0 website, but <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span>’s literary staging forces us to reconsider the textual character and material more thoroughly, since the message is beyond the immediately decodable and recognizable. This is where <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span> unfolds as a critical insight into a networked and digital concept of text and into Barthesian textualization - a critical insight encompassing the character of all the text surrounding us that has escaped the page and the book. The internet and the automatic overview created through the linking of the search engines deliver the textual raw material; <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span> merely displays, displaces, and iterates this. By its very title and the omission of the “l”, <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span> invokes a position between literature and computerized iteration. Iteration in programming designates the repetition of a process from an initial set of conditions until a terminal condition is met, and it is a fundamental part of many algorithms, often expressed in loops . <span class="booktitle">Iterature</span> explores a border area between what is literature and text to the human reader and how computers treat text; an area we experience whenever we read and write in connection with machine readers and text processors on the internet such as search engines, machine translation, automated publishing and linking, dynamic web-pages, web 2.0, weblogs, social software systems, e-business systems, advertisements, marketing, and meta-tagging as it is envisioned in the semantic web project. <span class="booktitle">Iterature.com</span> is therefore an example of contemporary interface literature - a literary treatment of networked text that creates a critical experience and points to potentials other than the orderly, functionalistic ideas of the semantic web, or the semantic capitalism of web 2.0 and other attempts at domesticating and taming the world wild web.</p>
<p>Thanks to Stacey M. Cozart for proof-read and corrections.</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Barthes, Roland. <span class="booktitle">The Rustle of Language</span>. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley &amp; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989.</p>
<p>Benjamin, Walter, Rolf Tiedemann, and Hermann Schweppenhèauser. <span class="booktitle">Gesammelte Schriften</span>. Werkausgabe. ed. 12 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980.</p>
<p>Berners-Lee, Tim, James Hendler &amp; Ora Lassila. “The Semantic Web.” <span class="booktitle">Scientific American.</span> May 2001 2001: 34-43.</p>
<p>Bertelsen, Lars Kiel, and Søren Pold. “Hvad Viser Skærmen? - Interfacet Mellem Referentiel Og Medial Transparens.” <span class="booktitle">Kunsthistoriske Kontakter</span>. Ed. Anne-Louise Sommer &amp; Hans Jørgen Frederiksen. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2003. 97-116.</p>
<p>Bolter, J. David. <span class="booktitle">Writing Space the Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing</span>. Hillsdale, N.J: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1991.</p>
<p>Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. <span class="booktitle">Remediation: Understanding New Media</span>. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.</p>
<p>Cramer, Florian. “Free Software as Collaborative Text.” <span class="booktitle">Sarai Reader 01: The Public Domain</span>. New Delhi &amp; Amsterdam: Society for Old and New Media de Waag, 2001. 199-206.</p>
<p>—. <span class="booktitle">Words Made Flesh - Code, Culture, Imagination</span>. Rotterdam: Media Design Research, Piet Zwart Institute, 2005.</p>
<p>Foucault, Michel. <span class="booktitle">The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences</span>. Reprint ed. New York: Random House, 1994.</p>
<p>Goriunova, Olga. <span class="booktitle">Readme 100 Temporary Software Art Factory</span>. Dortmund: Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt. &amp; Hartware MedienKunstVerein, 2005.</p>
<p>Goriunova, Olga, et al. <span class="booktitle">Read_Me Software Art &amp; Cultures</span>. Aarhus: Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, 2004.</p>
<p>Hayles, N. Katherine. “Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” <span class="booktitle">Postmodern Culture</span> 10.2 (2000).</p>
<p>—. Writing Machines. <span class="booktitle">Mediawork</span>. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002.</p>
<p>Howe, Denis, et. al. “Free on-Line Dictionary of Computing”. 1993-. <a class="outbound" href="http://foldoc.org/">http://foldoc.org/</a>.</p>
<p>Landow, George P. <span class="booktitle">Hypertext the Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology</span>. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.</p>
<p>Lessig, Lawrence. <span class="booktitle">Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity</span>. New York: Penguin Press, 2004.</p>
<p>Manovich, Lev. <span class="booktitle">The Language of New Media</span>. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001a.</p>
<p>—. “Post-Media Aesthetics”. 2001b. 13 March, 2006. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/Post_media_aesthetics1.doc">http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/Post_media_aesthetics1.doc</a>.</p>
<p>Mathews, Harry, Alastair Brotchie, and Raymond Queneau. <span class="booktitle">Oulipo Compendium</span>. Atlas Arkhive; 6. London: Atlas Press, 1998.</p>
<p>Nielsen, Henrik Kaare, and Søren Pold. <span class="booktitle">Kulturkamp.Com - Mellem Åbne Værker Og Intellektuel Ejendomsret</span>. Vol. 9. Århus: Center for Digital Æstetik-forskning, 2005.</p>
<p>O’Reilly, Tim. “What Is Web 2.0 - Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software”. 2005. 18 Jan. 06. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html">http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html</a>.</p>
<p>Ong, Walter J. <span class="booktitle">Orality and Literacy</span>. London &amp; New York: Routledge, 1988.</p>
<p>Paulson, William. “Computers, Minds, and Texts: Preliminary Reflections.” <span class="booktitle">New Literary History</span> 20 (1989): 291-303.</p>
<p>Perloff, M. “The Oulipo Factor: The Procedural Poetics of Christian Bok and Caroline Bergvall.” <span class="booktitle">Textual Practice</span> 18.1 (2004): 23-45.</p>
<p>Pold, Søren. <span class="booktitle">Ex Libris Medierealistisk Litteratur, Paris, Los Angeles &amp; Cyberspace</span>. Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2004.</p>
<p>—. “Interface Realisms: The Interface as Aesthetic Form.” <span class="booktitle">Postmodern Culture</span> 15.2 (2005).</p>
<p>Stalder, Felix. <span class="booktitle">Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks</span>. Kuda.Read. Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2005.</p>
<p>Walker, Jill. “Feral Hypertext: When Hypertext Literature Escapes Control.” <span class="booktitle">Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia</span>. Salzburg, Austria: ACM Press, 2005.</p>
<p>“Wikipedia”. <a class="outbound" href="http://en.wikipedia.org">http://en.wikipedia.org</a>.</p>
<p>Aarseth, Espen J. <span class="booktitle">Cybertext Perspectives on Ergodic Literature</span>. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/iterature">Iterature</a>, <a href="/tags/oulipo">oulipo</a>, <a href="/tags/perloff">perloff</a>, <a href="/tags/barthes">barthes</a>, <a href="/tags/bruno">Bruno</a>, <a href="/tags/web-20">web 2.0</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1217 at http://electronicbookreview.comAn Interview with Harry Mathewshttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/wuc/foreignness
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Michael Boyden</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2006-09-29</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="epigraph">This interview is one element in an overall ongoing gathering of works by and about Mathews, compiled by <a class="internal" href="../wuc/dense">Michael Boyden</a>.</p>
<p class="emphasis">I must say that I have had a hard time getting in touch with you. Could it be that there is some kind of hidden pattern involved in your travels? I was reminded of the Flemish writer Hugo Claus who equally has a habit of frequently moving from one place to another (once he even moved into the house next to the one he was living in at the time). He has explained this behavior in terms of a fear of becoming set in his ways. How do you look upon this? Is your habit of moving around in some way linked to your creative work?</p>
<p>I used to love traveling - discovering new places - but what I have done for some time now is something different: moving between familiar places where I feel at home - Key West and New York in America, Lans-en-Vercors and Paris in France. It’s always seemed a blessing to have another place to look forward to: that way one never need feel trapped. Having two places is enough; obviously four is too many, although once I started spending half the year in the United States, the pattern readily duplicated itself, so that now I devote too much time readjusting to each move. The only connection of this [urge to move all the time] with my work is that I get far less done than if I had the sense to sit still in one place. But which place? I love them all.</p>
<p>As for work, I prefer having a room outside my living space where I won’t be reminded of all the practical things I haven’t yet taken care of.</p>
<p class="emphasis">Oskar Pastior has been awarded this year’s Georg-Büchner-Preis. How important do you think this prestigious award is, not just for Pastior’s work, but also for pattern poetry in general? I mean, do you think that this could be a way of getting more people interested in a certain way of writing that normally only entertains a rather small audience? Or would you say this broader recognition is of comparatively little consequence? Further, how important would you say that Dalkey Archive has been for the promotion and circulation of your work?</p>
<p>I was delighted by the news that Oskar had received the Büchner Prize because it is an exceptional public acknowledgment of his accomplishment as a poet, and because I imagine that it will make it easier for him to earn his living giving readings and lectures as he has done for many years. It may perhaps win him new readers; I doubt that they will be numerous. (Since Beckett won the Nobel Prize, sales of his works have remained pathetically small.) On the other hand, his work may be taught more frequently, and this may earn him a position as a modern classic in the academic world. I doubt even more strongly that the prize will gain adherents for what you call pattern poetry: that audience, judging by the spread of interest in the Oulipo in America, grows by a gradual process of readers and writers spreading the word among each other. Furthermore in Oskar’s case it is not his choice of methods that makes him a fascinating writer but the effective use he makes of them, which is idiosyncratic as well as irresistible.</p>
<p>As for the Dalkey Archive Press, I am a loyal partisan, grateful for its having published or reprinted my books for the past twenty years. My feeling is that an essential task of a non-main-stream writer is to remain patient and persistent in following his or her calling, and Dalkey’s support has been a tremendous help for me in this respect. It has the sense of commitment to its writers that used to be common among major publishers but has now become depressingly rare, and it has comforted me in recent years by freeing me from having to think of anything but the process of writing itself.</p>
<p class="emphasis">Would you say that there is a connection between your musical training and your activities as a writer, and in particular your use of constraints? Gerald Howard once said in <span class="booktitle">Bookforum</span> that “Mathews writes the way Satie sounds.” Would you agree with such a statement? For me, part of the attraction of your books resides in the fact that they are written in a rather straightforward (almost officialese) fashion, but at the same time appear completely off the wall. Perhaps this is where the comparison with Satie comes in?</p>
<p>I’m a great admirer of Satie, so I can hardly mind being compared to him; but I think his approach to his art is very different from my own. (I don’t remember Gerald Howard’s comment - perhaps if I read it in context I would understand it better.) Plainness of language plus provocativeness - OK. But Satie’s provocation proceeds entirely from his deliberate and arbitrary simplicity of language and form, something totally subversive in his late-romantic context. It has the purity of Dadaism, for me the exemplary movement of artistic modernism, but one whose approach works best in writing when applied to short works of poetry or prose. Why is this so? Because music, whatever the duration of any given work, is a self-contained object; whereas a written work of any length inevitably invokes the possibility of narrative, no matter what lengths the author may go to in order to avoid it. Composers, including Satie, never have to concern themselves with narrative - they only pretend to, sometimes; whereas in my prose writing there is inevitably an illusion of story and its possible significances - an illusion, admittedly, since there are only words at work, but a presence all the same.</p>
<p>I emphasize this [difference between Satie’s work and my own] because, where my writing is concerned, my involvement with music has had two distinct aspects. The first manifested itself when at the age of ten I became hopelessly enamored of Wagner’s operas, especially <span class="booktitle">The Ring of the Nibelung</span>. It was naturally the music that overwhelmed me, but through an eager misconstruing of the “system” of leitmotivs I was able to listen to the music as if it were a coded narrative: this didn’t diminish the explosive romanticism that so appealed to me, but it allowed me to think of it as a musical equivalent of storytelling. I soon moved on to composers who interested me in other ways, but I think that to this day I’m still animated by the entanglement of narrative with romantic longing, sexual passion and ultimate pessimism that I first experienced in listening to Wagner. It was the dangerous power of that experience that no doubt led me to turn to classicism rather than expressionism as my mode of writing.</p>
<p>The other main effect that music had on my writing came with the discovery of modernist composers on the one hand (Schönberg and his twelve-tone system, Stravinsky and his shrewdly calculated manipulation of rhythmic patterns), and 14th century ones on the other (Philippe de Vitry, Guillaume de Machaut, Francesco Landini and their elaborate metrical devices) - all of them composers who used arbitrary methods without any obvious concern for self-expression or the depiction of emotions to create works of the utmost fascination. They definitely provided models or at least justifications for the kinds of methods I used much later.</p>
<p class="emphasis">In an interview for <span class="booktitle">The Brooklyn Rail</span> you once said: “I used to feel like a foreigner in my own country, and now I’m a real foreigner.” This reminded me of Philip Larkin’s “The Importance of Elsewhere.” In Ireland, Larkin thought that his “strangeness made sense,” whereas in England there was “no elsewhere” to underwrite his existence. Is that also how you tend to look at it, being an American-living-abroad?</p>
<p>I was an American living abroad from 1952 to 1978, when I started teaching in the United States. Now I spend more time in America than I do in Europe, mostly in Key West and New York, cosmopolitan places that are easy to feel at home in. So the statement you quote hardly applies any more. It was certainly true for a long time, when all I’d known of America was the stuffy WASP society of the northeast, and living in France was a joy (aside from its obvious amenities) because people there leave you alone, and if you’re a foreigner, that’s hardly news.</p>
<p class="emphasis">Nowadays in literary and cultural studies, there is a lot of fuss about the so-called “new” cosmopolitanism, which is supposed to be a turn away from pluralism and a return to an earlier universalism, but without its more obvious Eurocentric implications. Authors such as V.S. Naipaul are sometimes labelled “new” cosmopolitans. How would you position yourself in relation to this new current, if that is what it is?</p>
<p>I hadn’t heard about the new cosmopolitanism, but I think I could probably have found my place more easily in a world where many literary traditions coexisted than in the America I grew up in. When I’d finished my first novel, <span class="booktitle">The Conversions</span>, a friend of mine gave it to a newly-arrived Chinese woman in Paris to type up. At the time - around 1960 - most readers in America didn’t have a clue as to what I was doing (I hardly knew myself). My typist liked the book and passed it around her circle of Chinese friends in Paris. Not only did they all like it too, more interestingly they found it a perfectly normal kind of novel. The same reaction might well have occurred among other non-western readers; it certainly was a rare event in my world.</p>
<p class="emphasis">My impression is that in American literary histories, internationalism is usually only tolerated insofar as it is internationalism in English. Authors such as Stuart Merrill, Francis Vielé-Griffin, Julien Green, and others are now seldom identified as “Americans” because they (also) wrote in languages other than English. You have on several occasions stated that you see yourself as an American author, but I can imagine that for many readers in the U.S. the appeal of your work resides precisely in the fact that it appears foreign. Would you say that this is a productive tension from your point of view?</p>
<p>When I was living in Venice in the mid ’70s, I attended a lecture on pornographic film by a distinguished Italian journalist. He observed that he could always recognize the national origin of a blue movie, and that what distinguished those from America was that they were intensely dramatic: their characters were always involved in some kind of violent ethical conflict; the simple presentation of sexual activities never sufficed. I think this element in my own work is one reason I consider it American. For instance, in “Country Cooking in Central France,” the irritable disdain of whoever is writing the recipe plays a crucial role - it dramatizes the entire text. This phenomenon is probably a legacy of our compulsion to moralize about everything; in any case, it’s one that I find myself consistently stuck with.</p>
<p>As for the appeal of what I write residing in its apparent foreignness, this is surely an age-old aspect of writing. The ancient Greeks claimed to have acquired their knowledge from Egypt; Roman poets boasted of introducing Greek practices in their own work; Baudelaire and Mallarmé cited Poe as an authority for what they were doing. In any case, hasn’t this appeal diminished greatly after several decades of so-called post-modernist American writing?</p>
<p class="emphasis">Roland Barthes once said that he had “little enjoyment of, or talent for, foreign languages … little taste for foreign literature, constant pessimism with regard to translation, confusion when confronted by questions of translators, since so often they appear to be ignorant of precisely what I regard as the very meaning of a word.” Your perspective seems to me diametrically opposed to that of Barthes. Could you perhaps elaborate a bit on how you deal with issues of language and translation?</p>
<p>Because I’ve written in detail about translation, I’m reluctant to add to what I’ve already said, feeling as I do that whatever ideas I may have come out more clearly in their detailed written form than in any semi-spontaneous version of them I might manage now. I apologize for referring to published works that may not be easy to find, but I feel it’s the only responsible way to respond to you question. An old story called “<a class="internal" href="../wuc/vital">The Dialect of the Tribe</a>” is a parable about the “impossibility” of translation: its narrator, hoping to explain the workings of an unfamilar language, ends up having to use its very own words to do so. A similar point is made in an essay, “<a class="internal" href="../electropoetics/ethno-linguist">The Case of the Persevering Maltese</a>,” but there I also present my own method for initiating a successful translation: recreating the sense of the text to be translated in the most down-to-earth, natural speech. In another essay, “<a class="internal" href="../wuc/efficient">Fearful Symmetries</a>,” I investigate particular problems of translation that arise in working from American English. Two conclusions I reach are: “What all these examples suggest is that efficient translation requires a fidelity to aesthetic function at least as great as the conventional fidelity to nominal meaning;” and “In other words, [translators must] set out to recreate the original text as if it were their very own work.” But these statements aren’t worth much without the lengthy examination of particular texts that precede them, as well as the inquiries into cultural questions such as the difference in the way Europeans and Americans conceive of knowledge. (The story can be found in the collection <span class="booktitle">The Human Country</span>; the essays in <span class="booktitle">The Case of the Persevering Maltese</span>, both published by Dalkey Archive Press.)</p>
<p>I must also say that translation is for me the essential discipline. Whenever I return to it, I realize that if I ever thought I knew anything about writing I now will have to learn it all over again.</p>
<p class="emphasis">Today, it seems hard to go round the fact that there is a massive trade imbalance between English and non-English writings. As Lawrence Venuti has put it, English is the most translated language in the world, but also the least translated into. Does the fact that you write (mostly) in a dominant language have some kind of effect on the way you write?</p>
<p>An effect, undoubtedly, but not exactly on the way I write. Many years ago I spent an evening in the company of a group of bright young Dutch writers, decidedly not main-stream. When I remarked that we were all part of a community working towards the same ends, one Dutchman smiled and asked, “How would you feel if you knew you would never have more than a hundred readers?” I saw what he meant.</p>
<p class="emphasis">David Bellos has stated: “la traduction normalise, et normalise peut-être trop en français.” Do you agree? Do you think that some languages translate easier than others, or would you say that all translations to a lesser or greater degree impose the values of the home culture onto the translated text, whatever the context? You yourself have argued in a conversation with John Ashberry that “French and English don’t quite mix in a fruitful way.” What exactly do you mean by this?</p>
<p>I agree with David Bellos’s statement (again, see “Fearful Symmetries”). But it was John Ashbery who made the statement about French and English not mixing, and I’m not sure what he meant, especially since his own translations from the French are so good. Perhaps he and I know French all too well - the more familiar I am with a language, the more “impossible” translating it becomes. When readers tell me how good my translation of Bataille’s <span class="booktitle">Le bleu du ciel</span> is, I keep my mouth shut.</p>
<p class="emphasis">In the <span class="booktitle">Oulipo Compendium</span>, <span class="booktitle">The Journalist</span> is cited as an example of the constraint “x mistakes y for z.” Although I was not aware of this when I first read the book, I did sense that there was something going on along these lines. I first thought of the work as some kind of comedy of errors with an existentialist twist, and I had a similar impression when reading <span class="booktitle">Cigarettes</span> or <span class="booktitle">My Life in CIA</span>. Would you say that it adds to the reading experience when the reader is aware of the patterns involved in an Oulipian novel or one that is advertised as such?</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">The Journalist</span> is hardly an example of x mistakes y for z: the constraint was only a convenient way of formalizing the relationships that exist before the novel begins. I feel that the book is chiefly a parable of the way an obsession with writing can take over the reality of a writer’s life. While I knew more or less what was going to happen when I started writing it, the form events took followed its own, non-Oulipian course.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Cigarettes</span> is based on an Oulipian scheme, but one that becomes so transparent that it is beyond noticing: but there appears to be another scheme, one that emerges from the story’s various plots (and their misrepresentations) and is something like the puzzle of a detective novel - frankly, it’s this I imagine that gave you the impression of “something [else] going on.” I think the same thing - the mystery novel element - is true of <span class="booktitle">My Life in CIA</span>, although perhaps a lifetime habit of writing in puzzling ways infuses everything I do, even when I try to keep things as simple as possible.</p>
<p>As for your final question, I find that what most intensifies the reading experience is the <span class="lightEmphasis">awareness</span> that a hidden pattern or structure exists, without one’s exactly knowing what it is. This makes the reader sit up and pay attention.</p>
<p class="emphasis">It seems to me that (the striving for) isolation is a recurrent element in your work. What I find particularly interesting is that this isolation is usually presented as a relational concept, i.e. it is produced by interactions with other individuals who constantly fuel but also frustrate this desire for autonomy. In <span class="booktitle">Singular Pleasures</span>, for instance, there is often a more or less passive witness involved in the act of masturbation: an indifferent lover, a dentist, a father confessor, a cat, or just a TV set. One of the characters in <span class="booktitle">Singular Pleasures</span> is beautifully described as an “ascetic sensualist” who tries to reconcile the joys of poetry and self-gratification. Do you think this paradox of an ascetic sensualism can usefully be extrapolated to the poetics underlying your writings?</p>
<p>It’s interesting that you find “a striving for isolation” in my work: it certainly marked much of my life. From the age of six to fourteen I harbored the gloomiest doubts about myself and avoided making or keeping friendships. And why else would I settle at the age of 28 in an outlying house of a tiny hamlet outside a mountain village in an austere, little-frequented region of a country not my own? In any case becoming a writer in itself means condemning oneself to solitude. But where the work is concerned, frankly I don’t see it. (Aren’t Zachary and Twang, Elizabeth and Maud and Phoebe all living tributes to love? And “the journalist’s” isolation is clearly a form of insanity.) But no doubt my experiences manifested themselves without my knowing it.</p>
<p>“Ascetic sensualism” may be an acceptable way of describing what I’m after. The ascesis would lie in a classical reliance on suggestion instead of exposition, on questioning rather than drawing conclusions, on reducing one’s tex to minimum length; the sensualism would be found in the poetic density this can bring to language.</p>
<p class="emphasis">In your latest novel, <span class="booktitle">My Life in CIA</span>, the protagonist is constantly trying to be on top of things, but the more he tries, the more he gets tangled up in all kinds of schemes not of his own making. When rereading the work, I realized that both the Orsini and the Hohenzollern carry a bear in their coat of arms, which nicely connects the beginning and the end of the novel. The bear is also a symbol of greed, which I felt to be an encompassing theme in the work: greed for women, for good food, for recognition in the French literary circles, for the truth… The rumor that the protagonist is “CIA” then serves to trigger a Dantesque descent into a hell, which is supposed to purify him of his greed. I am not sure, however, whether in this context the purification ritual is all that successful. Would you agree that this is a rather bleak picture?</p>
<p>I don’t agree. The presence of bears notwithstanding, you’re loading the dice by using the word “greed” when plain “desire” would do, or even “enthusiasm.” “Greed for women”? That may be what the narrator <span class="lightEmphasis">claims</span> to have, but it strangely remains purely theoretical. “Greed for good food”? One three-course dinner eaten late in the evening after the fatigue of giving a lecture? Ordering lamb chops at Maxim’s? Enjoying beef stew and pan fries in a mountain refuge? The Oulipo aside, French literary circles are similarly thin on the ground. As for the truth - which I take to be the central topic of the book - in the narrative the poor foolish man (me) hardly goes looking for it but has it thrust in his face. Falling off the path into the demanding, invigorating world of shepherding may not “purify him of his greed” but does, I think, teach him that he shouldn’t play adventurous games, even exhilarating ones, and that there are simpler ways to live a happy life (or at least a happy ten days). But that of course is not the end of the story.</p>
<p>(Let me parenthetically clear up a question concerning “good food” that was raised by another book. American readers of <span class="booktitle">The Journalist</span> often express surprise at the elaborate meals Daisy prepares for the narrator day after day. The setting of the novel is an unnamed southern European town, and for southern Europeans such meals are not elaborate but normal, the kind wives are expected to serve up routinely. This is unfair to the wives, many of whom have daytime jobs; but they still manage.)</p>
<p class="emphasis">How do you feel about electronic literature? I was thinking, for instance, of Geoff Ryman’s internet novel <span class="booktitle">253</span>. Do you think that it can offer new patterns to work with, or would you rather see them as extensions of existing constraints?</p>
<p>I’m all for electronic literature, albeit at a distance. Judging from the work done by the ALAMO, the Oulipo’s electronic cousin, structures specific to the medium will necessarily develop and probably have already done so. On the other hand, there is nothing new under the sun; at least if you read the poets.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/boyden">Boyden</a>, <a href="/tags/mathews">mathews</a>, <a href="/tags/dalkey-archive">dalkey archive</a>, <a href="/tags/pastior">Pastior</a>, <a href="/tags/ashbery">Ashbery</a>, <a href="/tags/gerald-howard">Gerald Howard</a>, <a href="/tags/larkin">Larkin</a>, <a href="/tags/barthes">barthes</a>, <a href="/tags/beckett">beckett</a>, <a href="/tags/satie">Satie</a>, <a href="/tags/wagner">wagner</a>, <a href="/tags/oulipo">oulipo</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1151 at http://electronicbookreview.comVerse in Reversehttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/wuc/stuttered
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Alan Sondheim</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-06-27</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Well, <span class="booktitle">Drawn Inward</span> is palindromic, and the work as a whole won the “Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn Award for Best Book-Length Work of Formally Constrained English Literature, judge Christian Bok.</p>
<p>And there are four sections as follows:</p>
<p>I Word Palindromes</p>
<p>the words of each poem run in the same sequence backwards as they do forwards</p>
<p>II</p>
<p>each poem is spelled the same as the one next to it</p>
<p>III Palindromes</p>
<p>the letters in each poem run in the same sequence backwards as they do forwards</p>
<p>IV Poems about trains</p>
<p>IV is poems about trains which of course are linear and track-confined. II is of great interest in relation to line break-up:</p>
<p>Scar City</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The iron echo reaches<br />
the mage’s ear.</p>
<p>Chests of industrial shards.</p>
<p>Admissions in juries.</p>
<p>Scarcity</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Their one chore aches them.</p>
<p>Age searches to find us.</p>
<p>Trials.<br />
Hard, sad missions.<br />
Injuries.</p>
<p>Now these are wonderful which brings up all sorts of questions, - they’re sad and almost classical (Greek Anthology) poems, haiku-like, as they would be with a grammatology that collapses phrase and structure.</p>
<p>Why would one write in such a manner? Is the formal constraint external or internal? Need one be aware of the constraint to appreciate the work? Does the restraint hinder?</p>
<p>In general, what is the purpose of the palindromic or formally constrained literature? For one thing, there is the verve of it, the cleverness and what appears to be clearly obsessive production. There is the interaction at times between the constraint and the content - and there is the aesthetics of doing something of interest, something even moving, given the constraint. It’s as if the constraint possesses a diacritique of its own, a meaning-supplement to what might otherwise be considered fill. In other words, meaning is filtered through this process, which, through condensation and displacement (ab -&gt; c, ab -&gt; ba etc.) touches on the dream and its stuttered enunciations.</p>
<p>But there are no satisfactory answers, just as there are no satisfactory answers to what constitutes any poem, and all those forms from sonnet to free to langpo are in themselves constraints - as is the political economy of poetry and poetics in general. (And perhaps there are no <span class="lightEmphasis">satisfactory</span> answers to any question.)</p>
<p>All of that being said, what a wonder that this book is moving, that it is a joy to read and re-read, as if in spite of (to spite) the constraint, as it it’s actually about the freedom that constraint can, in some circumstances, open up in terms of subjectivity, language, the murmur. This relatively slim work deserves close attention; the poetics are kenning-bound, and just as rewarding.</p>
<p>Same Nice Cinemas</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Same nice cinemas,<br />
same nice cafe.</p>
<p>We talk late.</p>
<p>We face cinemas.<br />
Same nice cinemas.</p>
<p>Read this book, buy this book!</p>
<p>References: Bok of course, Oulipo, George Trakl perhaps, haiku/waka, and on and on, perhaps.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/poetics">poetics</a>, <a href="/tags/christian-bok">christian bok</a>, <a href="/tags/oulipo">oulipo</a>, <a href="/tags/george-trakl">George Trakl</a>, <a href="/tags/haiku">haiku</a>, <a href="/tags/waka">waka</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1078 at http://electronicbookreview.com